Mende Language Post #2

Post by Lara

25 August 2012

One of the first things we learned in Mende class proved to be one of the hardest things for me to get used to about the language, and that is how to say “yes” and “no”.  In Mende, the vowel sounds “ah,” and “oh,” as well as the consonant sound “mm” all function as “yes”.  To say “no,” just double the sound: “Ah-ah,” “oh-oh,” “mm-mm”.  So when asked a yes-or-no question, you can simply respond with either one syllable or two:

“Bi hinii mia?”                    [“Is that your husband?”]

“Oh.”                                     [“Yes”]

“Ndengaa lo wu yeya?” [“Do you have children?”]

“Ah-ah”                                                [“No”]

Seems simple enough, right?  But for whatever reason, that has taken me about a month to figure out and be able to use on the streets. Now comes the actual tough part. While it has such simple ways to say the words “yes” and “no,” Mende is not so easy when it comes to making positive and negative versions of a sentence. For one, the entire pronoun/verb changes based on whether it’s positive or negative, but to make things even more confusing for us learners, the change in pronouns/verbs is often just the doubling of a vowel sound [“Ngi” vs. “Ngii” for “I am” and “I am not,” for instance].  To make sure that the person you are talking to knows whether you are speaking in positive or negative terms, you can either nod your head “yes” while you speak or shake your head “no”.  As an example, check out the two sentences below:

“Ngi ko lo”                           [“I know it”]

“Ngii ko”                              [I don’t know]

I’m fairly certain that Mende is the first language I’ve ever studied where you use more syllables to say that you don’t know something than to say that you know it.  Very interesting indeed. We’re still working our way through figuring out positives and negatives, and in the meantime we’re practicing our “oh”s and “oh-oh”s in the marketplace.  When we take our [awesome, shiny, new] Trek bikes out into town, we have to do a lot of “oh-oh”s as people left and right ask us to give them our bikes. We’ve been moderately successful at explaining that since Peace Corps doesn’t let us ride motorbikes, they give us very nice bicycles to compensate. It’s still a bit strange to be asked to give someone your very expensive bicycle every time you take it for a ride.

Thanks for reading! If anyone has any requests for blog topics, please leave them in the comments section or email them to one of us. We’ve got a few in the works, but it’s becoming a bit more difficult to decide what to write about as life here in Salone becomes more normal for us. 

Our neighbor kid, Musa, who always has a smile on