I think I read the word in a book somewhere… I’d never actually used it until this week. I was talking to a Malian and needed to say there was a 1% chance of something happening and I said “kɛmɛsarada kelen” … I paused and asked if it made sense since I’d never used or heard the word in speech and the person I was speaking to said yes and that it’s a pretty commonplace word.
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I ni ce! Yes, it’s common (1,565 times in Bambara Reference Corpus) and appears in other dictionaries such as Bamadaba. Good to have it noted here! ![]()
Thanks, Coleman! South Africa is having an energy crisis and we’re having rolling blackouts constantly, and last night I was able to happily pass the time in the dark reading through the forum. I wanted to ask if you know the etymology for “kemesarada” — is it just “to break up one hundred”?
It’s a compound noun. Roughly:
kɛmɛ-sara-da
hundred-portion-put