Today my language consultant, Pe Mamy, and I finished preparing a translation of a leaflet about COVID-19 into Mano (he translated and I bugged him with my endless questions about Mano). I learned many things, including the following:

• There is a special word for ‘shop’ (meaning a walled trading area, big, like a supermarket, or small, like a cellphone shop, as opposed to an open stand at a market, for example), pìlìkí
• I did not know how to say in Mano “to sneeze into an elbow pit” (now I do: tùsóò ɓo kɔ̀ túkpáà yi, and no, tùsóò, which means ‘sneezing’, does not come from French tousser, according to Pe; well I guess the sound is similar for all human beings).

• There was a peculiar problem related to the symptoms of COVID-19. Do you need to have them all (cough, fever, fatigue, breathing difficulties) or one or a couple is enough? The thing is that in Mano, you need to decide when you translate. Pe chose the so-called consecutive form, which is widely used, for example, in narrative sequences (veni, vidi, vici, I came then I saw then I won), but also to express simultaneity. We decided to add “sometimes” at the end of each phrase describing a symptom (you cough — sometimes (but sometimes you don’t), then you are tired — sometimes, then you have fever — sometimes).
• In Mano, final high tone systematically changes to mid in affirmatives. Pe prefers to write mid, instead of high. Or, il questions final tone changes to high, and Pe prefers to mark it, as well. Does anyone have experience of analyzing native speakers’ notation of prosody (or tonal operations) affecting tonal realization? Like, what do people do with downstep?
• Although the consecutive construction includes a subject index, so it is finite in a way, it has a reduced finiteness. In particular, it is the only verbal construction with a subject index that can occur within a clausal nominalization (I guess that means that it is situated in the IP-adjoined position, much like postpositional phrases, but not in a CP?). I wrote about it a bit in my forthcoming Linguistic Typology paper. What I did not know — and what aligns quite neatly with previous observations — is that you can have one postpositional phrase which has a scope over both the main clause and the consecutive construction. You can say: cough then sneeze (with a consecutive) in your elbow pit, it would mean that one should BOTH cough AND sneeze in one’s elbow pit. But if you say cough, sneeze (with an optative) in your elbow pit, it would mean that you cough no matter how and then sneeze specifically in your elbow pit. It is kinda explicable if the postpositional phrase is adjoined higher than the consecutive, right? (But then something interesting happens with conjunctions which I don’t know how to explain, students of clause-combining, do get in touch!)
• Mano has a floating plural quantifier píé. You don’t need to use it within a noun phrase, you can add it at the end of the clause and still it will have a scope over some noun phrase within the clause. It can also have a meaning which I dubbed (I am not sure it is a good term) “implicit associative”, meaning something like “etc.” (avoid gathering in the marketplaces, churches, mosques, etc.). It was nice to have another example of that, but what’s more, I also realized that it, too, has some sort of mirative meaning. In such a case it does not need any noun phrase to have scope over! Let’s say, my house is destroyed by a flood and Ce comes to fool around. I will say, Cèé ē nū píé zèē áà tá̰ kɛ̀ — Ce came PLURAL in here and he is dancing. The adnominal plural markers nì and vɔ̀ have the same polysemy. I have once given a paper on this polysemy pattern with some tentative idea of the grammaticalization sequence (at SLE in Stockholm in 2012, the slides are here) and wrote a little bit about it in a paper on the semantics of number (in Russian), but never really wrote up anything substantial. Mirativity students, do get in touch!

Stay safe!