For a while I was thinking preposition, but it seems really inconvenient for a language to prefer that prepositions appear at the extremes of sentences. What do I know, though.

Oh, and my guess is that ne kama ne serves as a conjunctive adverb (like furthermore or however in English).

Don’t know what to make of that ne ne, though.

Some raw-ish observations:

- “ne” is the most common word in the sample data. It is more common than the most common punctuation marks, “.” and “,”. It is the most common word following a period (“. ne” gives 158 hits; the runner-up “. si” has 115) and the most common word preceding a period (“ne .”: 84; “ame .”: 72).

- “ne” usually appears before or after a “.” or “,”:
– 42.9%: immediately before “,”
– 13.6%: sentence-initial (“ne” after “.” “?” or “!”)
– 7.8%: sentence-final (“ne” before “.” “?” or “!”)
– 4.1%: immediately after “,”
– 31.5%: other

- There are 9 hits for “ne , ne” and one for “ne ne”. (“Si maɔsɛgu ne ne, ɔrɔ̃go kpakpa gɔ mpia…”)

- “ne kama ne” appears 31 times, almost always after punctuation.

- The most common word after a sentence ending in “ne .” is “ne”.

But I found myself wanting to browse the source text, and as soon as I did that, I noticed two things:

- Wow, that tool hides a lot about the nature of the sample!

- Right away I wanted to write Python scripts to analyze the data in ways the tool doesn’t support.

Doing this, I found out that in the file there’s 1 instance of “ne-oo” and 1 instance of “ne- – - oo!” No idea whether those are really instances of “ne” or something else entirely.

To all Eyes:
Do note that you can save snapshots of a particular state of the word tree by adding a comment below the visualization window (I appended one as an example).

I’m running out of time, so I’ll guess it has a grammatical function. Perhaps a negation (though I may be influenced by the spelling) or a question marker.

I find it frustrating not to be able to compare two things at the same time.