Is anyone familiar with an illness known as “kariya”? It appears in a primarily Arabic language text and is written like this “كريا” (kariyā).
Here’s the context:
It’s a Bambara word written in Arabic script. Or at least, my Bambara-speaking colleague and his family agree it is a Bambara word but cannot agree what it means! It’s the only non-Arabic word in the sentence, i.e typically:
“Chapter on curing the illness kariyā ” or “Fāʼidah (beneficial practice) to cure the illness kariyā”
My colleague Soumaila Coulibaly says: kaliya in Bamana is a sudden pain, for example lumbago. You can find it in Bailleul’s dictionary.
The term kariya (كريا) therefore looks like it might be a variant of what is káliya in other dictionaries, meaning a particular kind of sharp pain that is associated with various kinds of health issues that involve bulges such as hernias, slipped discs, tumors, cysts, etc.
R/L variation is very frequent across Manding varieties, so this might be what we are looking at in the text.