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