Georgi L. KapchitsSomali language and folklore · academic profile

Articles

The bibliography below is the one kept on the main site, shown here without the pages around it; where a full text is on the site, the entry links to it.

The complete list of articles, conference papers, reviews and notes, with their places of publication. Where the full text is published on this site, the entry links to it.

The list is taken from the author’s own bibliography as it stood on kapchits.narod.ru; entries confirmed against the source documents carry additional detail.

Articles

  1. Somali Literature — Literary Encyclopaedia. Moscow, 1987.
  2. On Types of Somali Folktales — Anthropologie Somalienne. Paris, 1993.
  3. On Subjects and Motifs of Somali Folktales — Cushitic and Omotic Languages (Proceedings of the Third International Symposium, Berlin, 1994). Cologne, 1996.
  4. Oral Forms of Speech and the Problem of the Development of the Written Norm in the Somali Language (with M. Kenadid) — The Literary Language and the Oral Spheres of Communication. Moscow, 1996.
  5. War and Peace in Somali Paremias — Africa: Societies, Cultures, Languages. Moscow, 1996.
  6. Somali Folktales — The Language of African Folklore (African Folktale). Moscow, 1997.
  7. War and Peace in the Somali Oral Traditions — Pour une Culture de la Paix en Somalie (Actes du Second Congrès International des Études Somaliennes, Paris, 1995). Paris, 1997.
  8. Logical Accent in Somali: Phrase Particle waa — Africa in the Mutable World. Moscow, 1997.
  9. The Somali Oral Traditions: A Call for Salvation — The Present-Day Importance of Oral Traditions. Opladen–Wiesbaden, 1998.
  10. Logical Accent in Somali: Phrase Particle baa — Africa: Societies, Cultures, Languages. Moscow, 1998.
  11. Logical Accent in Somali: Phrase Particle waxaa — Africa: Societies, Cultures, Languages. Moscow, 1999.
  12. On Somali Paremias — Proverbium (Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship), Vol. 17. Burlington, 2000.
  13. Some results of the Somali paremiological experiment in Berlin and Arhus — Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of Cushitic and Omotic Languages (Leiden, 2003).
  14. Towards the Somali Paremiological Minimum — War Destroys, Peace Nurtures. Lawrenceville, 2004.
  15. Variants and Variations of Somali Proverbs — Proverbium (Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship), Vol. 25. Burlington, 2008.
  16. Paremias without sentence particles — Akten des 7. Internationalen Semitohamitistenkongresses Berlin 2004 (Semitica et Semitohamitica Berolinensia, Band 5). Aachen, 2007.
  17. Somali kinship terms (with V. Porkhomovsky) — Semito-Hamitic Festschrift for A. B. Dolgopolsky and H. Jungraithmayr, ed. Gábor Takács. Berlin, 2008.
  18. Kinship terms and systems in Somali and Oromo (with V. Porkhomovsky) — Issledovanija po jazykam Afriki, Issue 3. Moscow, 2009.

Items 8, 10 and 11 form a set: the three phrase particles described one at a time, over three years, before the account was drawn together into the 2005 monograph. See Grammar & Syntax.

2016–2023: later papers

The author’s bibliography on the old site stopped in 2009. These later papers come from the author’s own materials received in August–September 2026 and from the publishers’ records (Crossref, the Tavira colloquium list, the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences); where a text is in the project archive, this is said.

  • The Trickster Against His Will: Towards the Study of Somali Folk Narratives — Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies, Vol. 17, 2017.
  • Towards the Lexicographical Description of Somali Nouns (with the Word “Road” as an Example) — Bildhaan, Vol. 17, 2017.
  • On the Somali Temporal Lexicon — Bildhaan, Vol. 19, 2019.
  • Somali Syntax in USSR, RF and USA — Bildhaan, Vol. 20, 2020.
  • On the Modern Classification of Somali Proverbs — Bildhaan, Vol. 21, 2021.
  • Introduction to European Proverbs by Rui João Baptista Soares and Elena Carter — Tavira, 2018, pp. 21–24. On proverbs as a way into a language and its culture, on the shared European stock and its sources, and on the two systems by which proverbs are indexed — Matti Kuusi’s typological classification and Permyakov’s logico-semiotic one. The publisher and ISBN are not given in the offprint and could not be found in library records; the question is with the author (September 2026). The full text is in the project archive. Full text (EN)
  • «Синтаксис сомали» в СССР, РФ и США — Восток (Oriens), 2021. DOI: 10.31857/S086919080013589-4. The Russian version of the Bildhaan 2020 paper, written for the 50th anniversary of A. K. Zholkovsky’s Somali Syntax (1971).
  • Hemingway’s Somali Proverb Confirmed (with Peter Unseth) — ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews (Taylor & Francis), published online 9 May 2017. DOI: 10.1080/0895769X.2017.1320209. On the Somali proverb in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber: earlier critics held that Hemingway had invented it, and the note establishes that the proverb is genuine by recording two Somali variants from informants. Named by the author in the May 2024 WardheerNews interview. The copy in the archive is a “latest articles” offprint, which carries no volume, issue or page numbers.
  • К лексикографическому описанию сомалийских существительных на примере слова «дорога» (On the lexicographical description of Somali nouns, with the word “road” as an example) — Исследования по языкам Африки (Studies in African Languages), Issue 6. Moscow: Klyuch-S, 2016, pp. 90–96. ISBN 978-5-906751-72-0. The Russian version of the Bildhaan 2017 paper; the volume is published by the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the author’s own copy is in the archive.
  • On Somali paremias based on numbers — 11th Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Proverbs: ACTAS ICP17 Proceedings, ed. Rui J. B. Soares and Outi Lauhakangas. Tavira: AIP-IAP, 2018, pp. 70–78. ISBN 978-989-98685-8-8. Ten enumerative proverbs (tiroley), from labaley to shanley, analysed by Permyakov’s logico-semiotic method; the conclusion is that the Somali number clichés are complex paremias of direct meaning, built of several thematic pairs. The text is in the project archive. Full text (EN)
  • On the artistic features of Somali paremias — 12th Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Proverbs: ACTAS ICP18 Proceedings, ed. Rui J. B. Soares and Outi Lauhakangas. Tavira: AIP-IAP, 2019. ISBN 978-989-20-9786-2. Listed in the colloquium’s table of proceedings; no copy in the archive.
  • Towards Logico-semiotic Classification of Somali Proverbs — in: Proverbs Are Never Neutral. Springer International Publishing, 2023, pp. 83–96. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-32646-2_5. Permyakov’s classification demonstrated on the thematic group Good–Bad: of its 28 formative groups, 19 are illustrated by Somali proverbs from the author’s collection of some five thousand. The text is in the archive; the rights belong to Springer, so only the details are given here.

Reviews and notes

  1. D. Stepanchenko, Mohamed Haji Osman. Short Somali-Russian and Russian-Somali Dictionary — Folia Orientalia 16. Kraków, 1975.
  2. Axmed Cali Abokar. The Camel in Somali Oral Traditions — Narodi Azii i Afriki 5. Moscow, 1988.
  3. Mohamed Mohamed-Abdi. Histoire des Croyances en Somalie — Vostok/Oriens 3. Moscow, 1993.
  4. B. W. Andrzejewski with Sheila Andrzejewski. An Anthology of Somali Poetry — Vostok/Oriens 2. Moscow, 1994.
  5. G. L. Permyakov — Russian Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 2. Moscow, 1995.
  6. Scholars in the Country of Poets (Notes on the 8th International Congress of Somali Studies, Hargeisa, 2001) — Horn of Africa, Vol. IXX. Newark, 2001. Full text (EN)
  7. Waa kan buuggii aan sugeyey 24ka sano (“The book I have waited for 24 years”) — Hal-Aqoon, 2002.
  8. Booqashadii labaad ee aan ku tegay Berbera (“My second visit to Berbera”) — Hal-Aqoon, 2004. Reprinted in KAYDSO: Qoraalladii Warsidaha BADSO 2014–2017 (ed. Idiris M. Cali), pp. 407–417, where it is dated 27 April 2015. Full text (SO)
  9. The Traveller to Legendary Lands (an interview with Sheila Andrzejewski about B. W. Andrzejewski) — WardheerNews, 12 April 2009; re-posted 31 January 2015; reprinted in KAYDSO, pp. 265–273. Full text (EN)
  10. Tol waa nin qumman qabanqaabadiis iyo nin qalloocan qabanqaabadiis (“A clan is made by an upright man’s management, or by a crooked one’s”) — WardheerNews, 1 October 2014. On the twelve types into which Somali proverbial clichés fall, against the common division into two. Reprinted in KAYDSO, pp. 109–112. Full text (SO)
  11. Gacan gadaal ka baqaysaa geed ma goyso! — WardheerNews, 26 February 2016. A reply to Cabdirisaaq Baraag’s article “Ayax teg, eelna reeb”: on the difference between a proverb (maahmaah) and a quotation (xig), and on the two conditions under which a quotation becomes a proverb. Baraag answered on 27 March 2016 (“Hubsiino hal baa la siistaa”, WardheerNews), and the author closed the exchange with the next item. Full text (SO)
  12. Nin habari dhashay hal ma seegi waayo — WardheerNews, 6 April 2016. A correction of the author’s own earlier attribution of the proverb Ayax teg, eelna reeb, tracing it instead to Shire Jaamac Axmed’s booklets Iftiinka aqoonta of 1966 and 1967. Full text (SO)
  13. Gorfeynta buugga «Godob iyo Gallad» (a review of the novel by Xuseen M. Cabdulle “Wadaad”) — WardheerNews, 24 April 2021. On the language of the novel — its verse, its proverbs (some of them new to the author after fifty years of collecting), its ideophones and the Benadiri dialect of Mogadishu — and on its plot, set in the 1970s. Full text (SO)

Note that the direction runs both ways: alongside the reviews written about Kapchits’s books, he reviewed the work of others — including, in 1994, the Andrzejewskis’ anthology of Somali poetry. Reviews of his own books are collected separately under Reviews.

Full texts on this site

The papers whose texts survive in the archive are published here in full:

Books are listed separately: Books.