I ni ke, @Iterimaa !
Right now in the table for “Manding Non-Verbal Copula Correspondences”, you added this for equatives in Mandinka:
When you listed the grammatical form you listed with with le in parentheses:
This same thing applies in Maninka:
The word le is a topicalization marker that puts emphasis on the item that it follows (at least in Jula and Maninka [in Bambara, the form is de because of the L/D sound change). So it’s optional in Maninka, but it’s so ingrained in speaking that this point that it’s almost marked to not use it when using equatives.
Is this similar in Mandinka?