Annotated Swadesh wordlists for the Western Mande group (Mande family).

Languages included: Southern Bobo Madaré [wmn-bob].

DATA SOURCES

Bobo Madaré

Le Bris & Prost 1981 = Le Bris, Pierre; Prost, André. Dictionnaire Bobo-Français, précédé d'une Introduction grammaticale et suivi d'un Lexique français-bobo. Paris: SELAF. // Detailed dictionary of the siā-dā (Bobo-Dioulasso) dialect of the Bobo language, accompanied with a comprehensive grammar sketch.

Tiendrébéogo 1998 = Tiendrébéogo, Beatrice. Rapport Sociolinguistique sur la Langue Bobo Madaré. SIL/ANTBA. // A sociolinguistic report on the different varieties of Bobo, accompanied with 230-item wordlists drawn from 8 different subdialectal varieties of Bobo.

NOTES

Southern Bobo Madaré

1. General.

Although present day Bobo has more than 300,000 speakers and its dialectal variety is impressive, the only large and representative dictionary is [Le Bris & Prost 1981], culled from the prestigious southern siā-dā (Sya, Syabéré) dialect of the language; naturally, this dictionary serves as our main source.

For additional control, the SIL lists in [Tiendrébéogo 1998] may be added as an auxiliary source, but comparison with Le Bris & Prost's dictionary reveals quite a few dubious entries at least as far as accurate semantic glossing is concerned. An additional problem is that phonetically and semantically, the dialects that Tiendrébéogo marks as "Syabéré" and "Bobo-Dioulasso" respectively, although close enough to the dialect described in Le Bris & Prost, do not fully coincide with it either in respect to semantics or phonetics. In the notes section, we list all relevant entries that Tiendrébéogo denotes as "Syabéré" and "Bobo-Dioulasso" for purposes of manual comparison and reconstruction, but without implying that they should be taken into consideration for lexicostatistical calculations.

Forms are typically entered in the same way as they are listed in the dictionary, i.e. root forms (infinitives) for verbs and singular forms for nouns (plural forms are normally listed in the notes section). Some of the suffixes that are either clearly segmentable on the synchronic level (e. g. the singulative suffix -nṍ) or can be easily identified as such through structural analysis (e. g. -go) are separated in the primary slot as additional morphemes; some other unproductive suffixes, however, may have been left unsegmented.

2. Transliteration.

The phonological transcription of [Le Bris & Prost 1981] requires only minimal corrections when transposed to UTS, such as:
(a) Le Bris & Prost's ny = UTS ɲ;
(b) Le Bris & Prost's doubled vowels (aa, ee, etc.) = UTS aː, eː, etc.

Database compiled and annotated by: G. Starostin, April 2015.