FAQ

Questions that come up often — about the work, the books, and what may be done with what is published here.

Who is Georgi Kapchits?

A Russian scholar of the Somali language, born in 1939. He began learning Somali in 1964 at the Institute of Oriental Languages of Moscow State University, where his first teacher was A. K. Zholkovsky — author of Syntax of Somali (1971), who left for the United States in 1979.

From 1967 to 1994 he worked in the Somali service of Moscow Radio; when the service was closed in 1994 he continued as a commentator for the Voice of Russia. In 2000 he defended a dissertation on Somali syntax at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University, supervised by V. Ya. Porkhomovsky. He is the author of eleven books (the count is his own, from the biographical note on the cover of the 2022 folktale collection), and has lectured in Moscow and Berlin.

Why does a Russian scholar work on Somali proverbs?

The short answer is the radio. From 1967 to 1994 he worked in the Somali service of Moscow Radio — nearly three decades of writing and speaking the language daily, for an audience that would have noticed at once if it were handled badly. That is a schooling of a different kind from a university course.

The longer answer is that Somali repays the attention. It is a language with one of the richest oral traditions anywhere; Richard Burton, passing through in 1854, wrote that the country “teems with poets”. Where poetry and proverb do the work that written literature does elsewhere, paremiology is not a marginal specialism — it is the way into the language itself.

And there is a line of descent. His first teacher, at the Institute of Oriental Languages in 1964, was A. K. Zholkovsky, whose Syntax of Somali (1971) is the foundation of Russian work on the language. Zholkovsky left for the United States in 1979; what he had begun did not stop.

What is a paremiological minimum?

The concept is G. L. Permyakov’s. It refers not to the whole proverbial stock of a language — which is effectively unbounded — but to the set of proverbs actually known to the majority of its speakers. For Russian, Permyakov established a minimum of about 300.

Dr. Kapchits established such a minimum for Somali, the first for any language of the Horn of Africa. The experiment was carried out in Berlin (Humboldt University, 1999; Free University, 2001) and in Aarhus (2001), with the support of the German Research Foundation. Forty-five informants were given the truncated openings of 656 proverbs and asked to complete them. Of the 29,520 possible completions, 12,342 — 41.8 per cent — were filled in correctly. From the results, 249 proverbs emerged as known to more than half of those questioned.

Those 249 are the working core of the language’s proverbial stock, and they are published in Hubsiimo hal baa la siistaa (Moscow, 2002).

Is it true that “Somalis do not lie in proverbs”?

The phrase is itself a Somali proverb: Soomaalidu been way sheegtaa, beense ma maahmaahdo — “Somalis may lie, but their lies never become proverbs.”

It gave its name to the book Soomaali been ma maahmaahdo (Ponte Invisible, 2012), which was presented at the fifth Hargeisa Book Fair in July 2012.

Where can I buy the books?

Honestly: for the most part, you cannot. Nearly all of these editions were printed in small runs — Hubsiimo hal baa la siistaa, for instance, in 1,000 copies — and sold out long ago. There is no warehouse to order them from.

What remains is the libraries. A number of the titles are held in research collections, and that is where most readers now find them. The full list of what exists is under Publications.

I know a proverb that is not in the collection. What should I do?

Write. This is not a polite formula — it has happened before, on a scale that changed a book. After an interview with WardheerNews in 2006, readers sent in so many new proverbs that the dictionary then in preparation had to be reopened and expanded.

What makes such a letter useful is the context: where and from whom you heard the proverb, the region, and the dialect. A text without those details is a curiosity; with them it is evidence. The address is on the Contact page.

Why is the site in three languages, and how do they differ?

The site exists in English, Russian and Somali. It is not three copies of one text: some material exists only in the language it was written in.

The clearest case is the essay on the 8th International Congress of Somali Studies (Hargeisa, 2001). It appeared in English in Horn of Africa (2001) and in Russian in the journal Vostok (Oriens) (2002, no. 2) — and these are not a text and its translation, but two independent versions by the same author, each written for its own readership. Both are worth reading.

May I use material from this site?

Quotation for scholarly and teaching purposes: yes, on one condition — cite the original edition where one exists. Reproducing a text in full is a different matter and requires permission.

The details, including what applies to work by other authors published here, are set out under Terms & Copyright.