It is used as a welcome in english. But what is the actual meaning of this phrase when greeting?
I already know that ‘karama’ means consideration or respect, but with bonya in this context is hard for me to understand what it means word for word.
Hi Malik!
So you mean that the expression “Bonya ni karama” is used as an equivalent of saying “Welcome” (as in, “Welcome to this place”) in Bambara? I’m not personally familiar with this exact usage, but it makes sense in a way.
Like you seem to see, the expression Bonya ni karama literally means something like “Respect and consideration” using two distinct nouns related to respect.
The specific word bonya is in the dictionary (if you look it up via search, make sure you click on it to be able to review the FULL definition):
As you can see, the noun is derived from the qualitative verb bon meaning ‘large; fat; big’, etc.
The word karama is orignally an Arabic loanword, which explains in part why there are two words for roughly the same thing in the expression.