Continuing the discussion from New! "Role Play Cards" prototype for greetings/goodbyes:
I think that you are asking in this in the context of the following sentence as a greeting response when someone asks about someone’s kids:
U bɛ yen
“They are here” (Lit. “They are there”)
Yes, in the most literal sense, yan is “here” and yen is there.
But you often here X bɛ yen (Lit. “X is there”) in a way that is more like “X is here” or “X exists”.
(It’s a little bit like in French, how people say “Je suis là” to mean “I am here” instead of “Je suis ici” despite the original meaning of là and ici. For instance, “U bɛ yen” in French would be translated as “Ils sont là”.)
For instance, let’s take a noun like wari (“money”). Imagine you told someone that you didn’t have any money and they responded:
Wari bɛ yen
Lit. “Money is there”
(as in, “You have got money”)
In French, this could be translated as “Il y a de l’argent”. In English, it could be “There’s money” or “Money is there”.
In the context of greetings though if someone asks about your children though and you say U bɛ yen, it means something more like “They’re here” (Fr. Ils sont là), as in, “They are present/around”.
I should add that “yen” is often truncated to just sound a [y]. For instance:
U bɛ yen → [U bɛ-y]
“They’re here/there”