Welcome to Kapchits.Online on Kapchits.Online

Some results of the Somali paremiological experiment in Berlin and Arhus

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Paper read at the 4th International Conference of Cushitic and Omotic Languages, Leiden, 10–12 April 2003.

Paremia is a Greek word which means saying, parable; paremiology refers to the philological branch of science dealing with proverbs, proverbial phrases and so on. The youngest branch of the science concerning proverbs, empirical paremiology, which operates statistical methods of analysis, is directed at the establishing of paremiological minima of different cultures. The paremiological minimum is a minimal set of proverbs, sayings and other paremias, the learning of which is necessary for the understanding of any language, whether native or foreign. The fact is that paremias not only decorate speech, but also serve as a convenient means of expressing typical real or thinkable situations, the signs and model of which they are.

Kinship Terms in Somali and Oromo: A Comparative Study

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Originally published in Исследования по языкам Африки, Выпуск 2 (2008)

Abstract

This study presents the first comprehensive comparison of kinship terminology systems in Somali and Oromo, two major Cushitic languages. Through systematic field research and analysis of 38 Somali kinship terms and corresponding Oromo equivalents from Borana and Arsi dialects, we establish both shared features and distinctive innovations that illuminate the historical relationships and cultural adaptations within the Cushitic language family.

Variants and Variations of Somali Proverbs

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Paper read at the 9th Congress of the Somali Studies International Association, Aalborg, 2004, subtitled “Some results of the paremiological experiment in Berlin and Aarhus”.

Paremia is a Greek word which means “saying”, “parable”; paremiology refers to the philological branch of science dealing with proverbs, proverbial phrases and other proverbial clichés. Between 1999 and 2001 a Somali paremiological experiment was accomplished by me in Berlin and the Danish city of Aarhus. The experiment had two major goals:

Paremias without sentence particles

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Paper read at the 7th International Semito-Hamitic Congress, Berlin, 2004.

In his review of my first book Andrzejewski attracted the attention of linguists to

“archaic grammatical forms which, paradoxically enough, form part of everyday language and are commonly used in conversations and in the mass media. A good example of this are those verbal and verbal-adjectival forms which exclude the occurrence of focus indicators (baa, ayaa, waxaa and waa) in declarative sentences such as for example Ayax teg eelna reeb — Locusts go away but leave damage behind and Tuug wax ka tuhun badan — A thief is more suspicious than anyone else. In Kapchits’ collection 7 per cent of all the items contain such grammatical forms, while normally focus indicators are obligatory in all declarative sentences.”¹

Reviews

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This page gathers information about responses to Dr. Kapchits’s books and about the work of colleagues connected with his research. Copyright in these reviews and articles belongs to their authors and publishers, so the full texts are not reproduced here: each item is given with its bibliographic details and a summary of its contents. Short quotations appear in quotation marks with the author named.

Reviews of the books

B. W. Andrzejewski

Review of: G. L. Kapchits. Somali Proverbs and Sayings in Somali and Russian with Russian Equivalents. Moscow: Nauka, 1983. 283 pp. Published in: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. XLIX, Part 2, 1986, pp. 420–422.

Lexical Glossaries

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lexical work occupies a distinct place in Dr. Kapchits’ somalistics. Alongside the study of grammar and paremiology, he has assembled and published glossaries of semantic fields that had previously been described only in outline — above all the terminology of kinship, and the archaic vocabulary of fractions preserved in traditional texts.

Kinship Terminology

The fullest of these glossaries is the corpus of Somali kinship terms compiled by G. L. Kapchits together with V. Ya. Porkhomovsky and published in the Semito-Hamitic Festschrift (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 2008, pp. 155–160). The corpus comprises 34 to 38 terms.

Out of the Mouth of Babes and Sucklings

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It is known that wisdom comes out of the mouth of babes and sucklings. Including, of course, the Somali ones. This fact has been reflected in many pieces of Somali folklore. Here is one of them:

It was necessary to solve an important problem, and all the inhabitants of the nomadic camp — men, women and elders — came together for a council. They were thinking a long time about what should be done, estimated this and that, but could not arrive at a single opinion. At last somebody said: “Let the elders decide. We shall do whatever they say.” All the people agreed. But there was a little boy sitting on the tree under which the meeting was being held. He heard how the discussion had ended. “The decision must be made by the cleverest men, not by the oldest!” said he. “He is right!” the astonished people said.

The proverbs shown on this site

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One of these appears on the front page each time it is loaded. The whole set is listed here.

Two hundred and forty-nine of them are the Somali paremiological minimum: the proverbs that the paremiological experiment found to be known to more than half of the speakers questioned. They are given below in the order the experiment established, from the one proverb every single respondent knew down to those known to just over half. That percentage is the finding, and it is what makes this list something other than an anthology.

Scholars in the Country of Poets

Sat, 01 Dec 2001 00:00:00 +0000

Notes on the 8th International Congress of Somali Studies (Hargeisa, July 3–13, 2001)

I

The Somalis affirm that the ancestors of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin lived in the Horn of Africa. They came from the Arab tribe, and that is why his great-grandfather, brought to Russia when a child, was named Peter the Great’s arap.¹

In Hargeisa I was reminded of it by clever and charming Abdulkadir Haji Ismail Jirdeh, who combines a passionate love of poetry with the prosaic work of the speaker of the local parliament. We met in the house of the Head of Hargeisa University, Sheikh Ali Ibrahim, who arranged a party in honour of the participants of the Congress. Standing on the flat roof and sipping orange juice (there is a dry law in Somaliland) we were talking about everything, and of course, about poetry, which in the country of poets goes without saying. By that time I had spoken enough Somali and was conversing in Russian with pleasure — my interlocutor remembered perfectly well the language he learnt in Odessa once upon a time. It turned out that he paid the highest tribute to the second genius of Russia, Michael Lermontov, and knew his poem “Demon” by heart:

Conferences & Congresses

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Four decades of Somali studies conducted largely from Moscow meant that the field itself was met at congresses — in Mogadishu, Hargeisa, Leiden, Berlin, San Diego. What follows is the documented record of those appearances, with the papers given at each.

Somali Studies congresses

4th Congress of Somali Studies — Mogadishu, 1989. The first visit to Somalia, at the invitation of the Somali Academy of Sciences. Twenty years later the same city was revisited in a series of travel essays written for Voice of Russia.

Media & Broadcasting

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Alongside the academic work, a large part of Dr. Kapchits’ professional life was spent in broadcasting — and much of what he wrote about Somalia was addressed not to scholars but to listeners. This page gathers what belongs to that side of the record.

Radio

Somali service of Radio Moscow, 1967–1994. Twenty-seven years of daily work in Somali, as announcer and translator, for an audience that would have noticed any carelessness at once. The section was closed in 1994.

Research Projects

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Behind the books there are four long-running lines of work. Each took years, and each produced something the field did not have before.

The paremiological experiment

The question sounds simple and had never been answered for any language of the Horn of Africa: which proverbs do Somalis actually know?

Collections tell you what editors have gathered. They do not tell you what is current. The method for finding out was developed by G. L. Permyakov, who established a “paremiological minimum” for Russian of some 300 items — the set genuinely known to most speakers.

About Dr. Georgi L. Kapchits

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dr. Georgi L. Kapchits

Candidate of Philological Sciences

Dr. Georgi Leonidovich Kapchits, born 2 October 1939, is a linguist and folklorist working on the Somali language and its oral tradition. His collection of Somali proverbs, reviewed by B. W. Andrzejewski in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1986, was described there as the largest ever published.

Education

1967 — graduated from the Institute of Oriental Languages, Moscow State University. Qualified as a linguist in the field of Amharic and Somali studies.

Contact

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dr. Georgi L. Kapchits

Somali linguistics, paremiology and folklore studies.

Email: geedka@aha.ru

Writing to Dr. Kapchits

Correspondence is welcome in Somali, Russian and English.

Readers have always been part of this work. After an interview with WardheerNews in 2006, so many readers sent in proverbs from their own families and regions that the dictionary in preparation had to be reopened and expanded. If you know a proverb, a variant of one, or a folktale that has not been recorded — it is worth writing about.

FAQ

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

For Students

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This page is for people beginning serious work on the Somali language and its oral tradition — students, translators, and anyone who has decided to go beyond phrasebooks. It sets out what to read, in what order, and what to expect from the hardest part of the grammar.

Start with the sentence particles

If one thing separates a learner who has understood Somali syntax from one who has not, it is the particle system: waa, baa (with its variant ayaa) and waxaa.

Photographs

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Thirty photographs from the archive of the old site. Mogadishu in 1950 and after the war, the journey through Puntland in May 2009, Djibouti, the conferences in Ohio, colleagues and friends.

The captions are those of the old site. Click a photograph to open it full size.

The photograph that headed the photographs page of the old site. It carried no caption there, and neither the place nor the year is known.

With A.K.Zholkovsky

Moscow. With a friend, my wife and Anisa Cabdi

Djibouti (2008, with Martin Orwin)

Mogadiscio (1950)

Mogadishu (boys on a car)

Mogadishu (panorama)

Mogadishu (port)

Mogadishu (soldiers)

Mogadishu (wall)

Mogadishu (water supply)

Mogadishu (with Cabdi Gobdoon)

Mogadishu-Garoowe

Ohio Conference

Ohio (with Barwaaqo and Cabdulqaadir)

Ohio (with friends)

Puntland (Boosaaso, resaurant)

Puntland (Boosaaso, with children)

Puntland (caravan)

Puntland (Eyl, geeddi)

Puntland (Eyl, hijacked ships)

Puntland (Eyl, Ina Cabdille Xasan)

Puntland (Eyl-Vladimir with fishermen)

Puntland (ostritches)

Puntland (tuulo, children)

Puntland (with a camel)

Puntland (with Keenaadiid and Qonof)

Mogadishu (President)

Mogadishu (remnants)

Ohio (with Jasmin)

Puntland (President Faroole)

Resources

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Links to institutions, journals and archives that exist and can be checked. Everything on this page was verified on 11 August 2026; entries that could not be confirmed were removed rather than rewritten.

Institutions

SOAS, University of London — African Languages, Cultures and Literatures Section.
Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin — includes the Seminar für Afrikawissenschaften.
Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University — where Dr. Kapchits began Somali in 1964 and defended his dissertation in 2000.
Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences — Moscow, founded 1959.
Department of African Studies, Faculty of Asian and African Studies, St Petersburg State University — Somali is among the languages taught.
African Studies Centre Leiden — host of the 4th Cushitic and Omotic conference (April 2003), where the paremiological experiment was reported.
Center for African Studies, Ohio State University — has run a Somali language programme since 2006.
African American & African Studies, University of Minnesota — Somali language courses.

Associations

Somali Studies International Association (SSIA) — founded 1978, organiser of the international congresses of Somali studies. The association has no website of its own; the page linked here is the account kept by the Hargeysa Cultural Centre.
African Studies Association — USA.
International African Institute — London.
Association of African Studies Programs — the North American programmes and centres.
The Nordic Africa Institute — Uppsala.

Publishers and Journals

Africa World Press & The Red Sea Press — the imprint devoted to the Horn of Africa.
Northeast African Studies — Michigan State University Press.
Journal of African Languages and Linguistics — De Gruyter.
Journal of African Cultural Studies — founded at SOAS in 1988 as African Languages and Cultures, under its present title since 1998.
African Studies — Taylor & Francis.
Journal of Somali Studies — Adonis & Abbey, published since 2014.
Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship — published by the University of Vermont through vol. 38 (2021), open access since vol. 39 (2022). Vol. 25 (2008) carried “Variants and Variations of Somali Proverbs”.
Oral Tradition — open access, Harvard University.
Vostok (Oriens) — the journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published since 1955; known as Peoples of Asia and Africa until 1991.

Language Archives and Databases

Ethnologue — languages of the world.
OLAC — Open Language Archives Community — a union catalogue of language resources.
ELAR — Endangered Languages Archive — now at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.
DOBES — Documentation of Endangered Languages — the archive of the Volkswagen Foundation programme, held at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen.
Smithsonian Folkways — recordings of traditional music.
UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage — the convention and its lists.

Somali-Language Media

BBC Somali — broadcasting since 1957.
VOA Somali
Radio Dalsan — Mogadishu.
WardheerNews — the site that published the 2006 interview with Dr. Kapchits.

Site map

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every page of the English version, laid out the way the site itself is laid out. Useful when you know a text exists but not where it sits, or when you would rather see the whole shape of the site at once than click through it.

Each language has its own map, and they are not identical: the Russian and Somali sections hold texts the English one does not, and the other way round. The maps in the other languages: Карта сайта · Khariidadda boggaga.

Terms & Copyright

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What this site is

Kapchits.online is a non-commercial academic resource devoted to the work of Dr. Georgi L. Kapchits in Somali linguistics, paremiology and folklore. It preserves and continues the material of the earlier site kapchits.narod.ru. Nothing here is sold, and the site carries no advertising.

Copyright in the texts

Essays, articles and translations by Dr. Kapchits published on this site remain his work. Where a text first appeared in a journal or a book, the place of first publication is stated at the foot of the page, and the rights of that publisher are unaffected by its appearance here.

Introduction to Aliqeyr Mohamed Nur's "Dhibkii Dheef Baa Ka Dambaysay"

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Kapchits’s introduction to the book Dhibkii Dheef Baa Ka Dambaysay («Well-being after suffering») by the Somali writer Aliqeyr Mohamed Nur — Caliqeyr Muxumed Nuur in Somali orthography. Published by Omhassan Publisher, Spånga, Sweden; ISBN 91-976661-3-0.

On the old site this introduction existed only as a scanned image, which means it could not be read by search engines, quoted or cited. It is transcribed here from that scan, which is reproduced below. The text carries no date of its own; the scanned file dates from February 2014.

The Guardian on the Hargeisa Book Fair

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In July 2012 The Guardian reported on the fifth Hargeisa International Book Fair under the title “Somaliland’s Hargeisa book festival celebrates fifth year”.

The festival — founded by Jama Musse Jama and described in the report as the Horn of Africa’s answer to Hay-on-Wye — was held in a workers’ club in the centre of the city, with ribbons in the colours of the national flag, tents selling watermelon, and armed guards at the gate. The report set out what the organisers were trying to do: preserve the oral tradition, fill a cultural vacuum left by two decades of collapse, and give young people something other than khat and recruitment by al-Shabaab. It described the work of setting up reading clubs and libraries across six regions.

“Somalis Do Not Use Proverbs to Lie”: Dr. Georgi Kapchits in the Horn Newspaper

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On 14 July 2012, at the 5th Hargeisa Book Fair, Dr. Georgi Kapchits presented his new Somali-language book Soomaalidu Been ma Maahmaahdo (“Somalis do not use proverbs to lie”). The following day the Horn newspaper published an interview with him, together with a report by Yusuf M Hasan.

At the Book Fair

The Somali language, with over 100,000 proverbs, is among the richest languages in the world. This was said by Dr. Georgi Kapchits during the interview in Hargeisa, where he also disclosed that the lengthy studies he has undertaken reveal that the Somali language has no proverbs for lies.

Drought in Somali Folklore

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A column (“Kolumni”) by Dr. Georgi Kapchits, first published in “Afrikan Sarvi / Horn of Africa Journal”, No. 1/2012, issued by Suomen Somalia-verkosto ry (Finnish Somalia Network).

‘From where rain was expected mist has come’, said one of the Somali ancestors, first looking at the pale sky and then at the herd of camels which he had just brought from the half empty Well of the Last Hope. ‘A she-camel which has not drunk water for thirty days will endure three days more’, answered his brother, trying to soothe him. ‘But what shall I do with them’, asked he, pointing at his sheep and goats which were hiding themselves under the tree from the hot rays of the Sun at its zenith. ‘A drought is coming’, uttered the first one.

The Country of Poets and Pirates

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In May 2009 the Voice of Russia observer Georgi Kapchits returned from Somalia where he served as an interpreter and consultant for a Russian television crew. He visited numerous parts of this formerly integrated country, met with political leaders and cabinet members, as well as fishermen, pirates, city residents and rural villagers.

In recent years, the fractured nation-state of Somalia, which occupies a vast territory on the Horn of Africa, has become notorious for the scandalous activities of local pirates who have captured dozens of trade vessels in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, then received millions of dollars in ransom money to relinquish the cargo ships and their crews. The amounts of money received by such marauders and their collaborators sometimes exceed the annual operating budgets of the current governments of Somaliland, Puntland and a shrunken “Somalia.”

Lamberti's Maps of Somali Dialects and the Current Socio-Linguistic Situation in South Somalia

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A study of Somali dialectology and its application to the language analysis of asylum seekers. The typescript bears no date; since it refers to an applicant who left Somalia in 2007, it cannot be earlier than that year — the dating given here is approximate.

I

In 1981 Marcello Lamberti undertook a scale research work in Somalia which resulted in a series of pioneering publications on Somali dialects. In “The linguistic situation in the Somali Democratic Republic” (1984), “Map of Somali dialects in the Somali Democratic Republic” (1986) and “Die Somali-Dialekte” (1986) he drew, as justly mentioned by Andrzej Zaborski, “a clear picture of dialect differentiation and dialect spread of the Somali language.”

Men and Women in the Somali Narrative Folklore

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The paper for the Buranbur conference in San Diego — 3 March 2007.

I am going to remind you of some Somali proverbs about women, their role in the traditional society and their relationships with men. Each proverb carries a message of the Somali ancestors to the present generation of the Somalis. Some of them are very funny and I hope you will enjoy them.

According to the following proverb, men are desperate about women. They say: Naago ama u samir, ama ka samir — Either suffer from women or suffer without them. But men understand that they badly need them: Naag waa belaayo loo baahan yahay — Woman is a disaster one cannot do without.

On Some Peculiarities of the Somali Language, Proverbs and Folktales

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The paper for the Buranbur conference in San Diego — 3 March 2007.

I

Somali is a very rich language from the point of view of phonetics, syntax and vocabulary. In its “Northern variant” (maxaad tidhi) it is a tonal accent language. The main classes of words in Somali are nouns and verbs.

Some words with attributive meanings belong to the class of verbs: dheer — to be long, cad — to be white, etc. The majority of words with adverbial meaning belong to the class of nouns: hoos-ta — bottom, si-da — mode, mean.

The WardheerNews Interview (2006): Selected Passages

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

On 25 January 2006 the website WardheerNews.com published a long interview with Dr. Georgi Kapchits, conducted in Somali by Isamail A. Hassan (“Khaliil”). Dr. Kapchits was staying in Berlin at the time, working on his dictionary of Somali proverbs. The interview was picked up by other Somali websites and became one of the most widely read pieces WardheerNews published that year.

The full Somali original is reproduced here: Wareysigii ay mareegtada WardheerNews la yeelatay Dr. Georgi Kapchits.