Bamanan

Letters

Combining marks

Punctuation

Other

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	alveolar	post- alveolar	retroflex	palatal	velar	glottal
stop	p b	t d				k ɡ ɡʷ
affricate			t͡ʃ d͡ʒ
fricative	f	s z	ʃ			ɣ	h
nasal	m	n			ɲ	ŋ
approximant	w	l			j
trill/flap		r

Tone

tbd

Structure

Typical Bamanan syllable types include the following.

CV is the standard form. Words are commonly CVCV. bana

CVV indicates a long vowel. The long vs. short vowel distinction is phonemically distinctive. baana

CVC occurs where the vowel is nasalised, using a syllable-final n. denkɛ

V occurs at the beginning of a word. abada

CCV/CCVV where a consonant is pre-nasalised, indicated by preceding it with n. nsaajɛ

Is there a syllabic nasal?

Is gb a feature of Bamana, and if so how is it written?

Vowel summary table

The following table summarises the main vowel to character assigments.

Bamanan vowels are mostly simple letters, but on rare occasions accent marks are used to indicate tone, and those are shown here. Many of the combinations of letter and tone are atomic characters.

For more details see vowel_mappings.

Here is the set of characters described in this section, grouped by general category.

Vowel letters

The Bamanan alphabet has 7 vowel letters, duplicated in upper- and lowercase. Long vowels are indicated by doubling the vowel letter.

Tone is not usually indicated outside of dictionaries and education materials, but it if is, another 21 accented characters are used (counting lowercase only). Of these, 15 can be represented as atomic characters. Otherwise, and in decomposed text, letters are combined with one of 3 diacritics (maybe four). See tones.

Standalone vowels

Standalone vowels are written using ordinary vowel letters and no special arrangements.

abada

olu

Observation: Most word-initial standalone vowels seem to be 'a'. Not clear whether there are any word-medial standalone vowels.

Tones

Hausa uses 2 tones, high, and low, however, there is no strict requirement to mark tones, and usually they are not marked. Even if tone marks are used, they don't reflect the detailed contextual effects that apply, especially in flowing text (see below).

In spoken Bamanan, tones are useful for distinguishing words that are otherwise written the samecd, eg. ba bá river, stream ba bà thousand

One exception tends to be the 2nd person and 3rd person pronouns, which are otherwise indistinguishable, eg. á a

Use of tones in transcriptions, dictionaries, etc. Tone marks do tend to be written in dictionaries or language-learning texts. Where tone is indicated, the high tone can be marked with 0301, but is commonly not marked unless the tone changes within a word. The low tone can be marked with 0300. An initial tone mark typically indicates the tones for all following vowels in a word, or until another tone mark appears, and so the mark is not repeated.

Typically, many of the vowel+tone combinations are expressed using precomposed characters, however precomposed alternatives are not available for all combinations. The basic set of characters needed to mark tones includes the following:

Long vowels may involve more than one tone, in which case one tone tends to be added to each vowel, eg. bàá

In some cases, a syllable containing a single vowel letter has a tone change that can be written using 030C , eg. bǎ

That would involve the following additional characters.

In fact, the phonetics of tones are more complicated than usually shown by the accent marks, especially in flowing text. For example, a word with 2 low tones marked usually has an unmarked high tone between them, some tonal sequences involve downsteps, etc. For more details, see Vydrinvv.

An additional low tone or downstep is also used in a grammatical role related to definitiveness. Vydrinvv uses the following example, where he represents the tone expressing definitiveness by a floating grave accent. Mùsó-` tɛ́ yàn The woman isn’t here. Mùsò tɛ́ yàn There’s no woman here.

A page by UCLA represents this phonetically as a downstep when it occurs after a low vowel, eg. dingɛ

Vowel sounds to characters

This section maps Bamanan vowel sounds to common graphemes in the Latin orthography.

Tones and uppercase letters are ignored.

Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Consonant summary table

The following table summarises the main consonant to character assigments.

Consonants are written using letters. There are several digraphs, most of which are prenasalised consonants.

For more details see consonant_mappings.

Basic consonant letters

Whereas the table just above takes you from sounds to letters, the following simply lists the basic consonant letters (however, since the orthography is highly phonetic there is little difference in ordering).

Vidrin observes that “in the intervocalic position, velar phonemes are not contrastive: [-g-], [-k-], [-ɣ-], [-x-] and even a zero consonant, -ø-, are allophones of a single phoneme.” Coleman adds that to represent this, “Latin-based orthographies vary widely in their preferred grapheme. One may often choose freely between g, k, or simply dropping the intervocalic velar (e.g., tága, táka versus táa ‘go’)”cdl

Pronunciation and consequent spelling of Bambara words may vary, influenced by dialect or sometimes other factors. The following are examples:

• d and l may be interchangeable, eg. firewood may be either dɔgɔ or lɔgɔ.
• the sound gʷ may be written as either g or gw.
• f and p may be interchangeable in a few words.

Digraphs

sh represents the sound ʃ, where needed in Bamanan text. It is more common in some dialects than otherswbm, and may sometimes be written instead as sy.

ny may be preferred by some people instead of ɲ, although if not word-initial it can create ambiguities related to nasalisation of the previous vowel.

kh is used to represent the sound ɣ in loan words from other languageswbm.

Prenasalisation

Bamanan syllables may begin with a prenasalised stop or fricative. This may sometimes be spelled phonetically, eg. mb, but more frequently is written using just n, ie. nb. Examples include: npan nbuuru ntɔn ncɔgɔn nsaajɛ

Consonant sounds to characters

This section maps Bamanan consonant sounds to common graphemes in the Latin orthography.

Tones and uppercase letters are ignored.

Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Transforming characters

Bamanan is bicameral, and applications may need to enable transforms to allow the user to switch between cases.

Word boundaries

Words are separated by spaces.

Compound words can be hyphenated, eg.

ɲɛ-ji

Graphemes

No issues arise with grapheme selection.

Phrase & section boundaries

Bamanan uses regular ASCII punctuation.

As for French, it is common for a space to appear before the semicolon, colon and question mark punctuation. In French this is usually slightly smaller than a normal space, and lines should not be broken on either side of that space. For this, 202F is ideal.

Quotations & citations

Bamanan texts may use guillemets around quotations, but mostly use quotation marks. Of course, due to keyboard design, quotations may also be surrounded by ASCII double and single quote marks.

Abbreviation, ellipsis & repetition

Bamanan words often elide vowels in a similar way to the English word "don't". For this, they use an apostrophe. A good character to use for this would be 02BC, but most of the time authors use the ASCII ' U+0027 APOSTROPHE, eg. compare: A ye à fɔ. A y’à fɔ.

… can also be found in Bamanan texts.

Line breaking & hyphenation

Lines are generally broken between words.

Text alignment & justification

Text alignment and justification follow the typical pattern for Latin script orthographies. Inter-word spaces provide the primary justification opportunities.

Baselines, line height, etc.

tbd

Bamanan uses the 'alphabetic' baseline.