Terms & Copyright
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.
The books are a separate matter. The monographs and collections listed under Publications were issued by their publishers — Nauka, Shaker Verlag, Ponte Invisible and others — and reprint, translation and distribution rights rest with them. Nothing on this site grants a licence to reproduce them.
Quoting and citing
Quotation for scholarly, educational and critical purposes is welcome and needs no permission, on the usual academic conditions: quote accurately, mark omissions, and cite the source.
Cite the original edition wherever one exists. A proverb, a tale or an argument that first appeared in a printed book should be cited from that book, not from this website. Where a text exists only here, cite it as a web publication with the page title, the URL and the date you consulted it.
Reproduction of whole texts — reposting an essay, an interview or a substantial run of proverbs — requires permission. Write to the address on the Contact page.
Photographs
The photographs come from Dr. Kapchits’s own archive and were carried over from the old site, where the captions were his. The rights are his, or in some cases those of whoever took the picture — for most of them the photographer is not recorded, and after thirty or more years cannot be established.
Use in scholarly and educational work is welcome, with the credit From the archive of G. L. Kapchits, kapchits.online. For any other use, write first.
Two things to note if you plan to reuse them. The captions are the old site’s own and have not been independently verified; where a caption gives no place or date, we do not know them and have not guessed. And the lead photograph on the Photographs page had no caption at all on the old site — which is stated on the page itself.
The proverbs and the dataset
The 253 proverbs are downloadable as JSON and CSV. The rights in them are not uniform, and the distinction matters:
| Status | |
|---|---|
| The Somali proverbs themselves | Traditional folklore. They belong to no one, and nothing here restricts their use. |
| The English translations and explanatory notes | The author’s own work, published in Hubsiimo hal baa la siistaa (Moscow, 2002). |
| The recognition percentages | Findings of the paremiological experiment — facts, which copyright does not cover. |
| The Russian lines | Working renderings made for this site from the author’s English. Not his published Russian versions. |
So a researcher may quote, count and analyse freely, citing the book for the translations. Republishing the English translations in bulk, or depositing the set in another repository under an open licence, needs the author’s consent, and that question is with him.
Until it is settled the dataset stays here: downloadable, but not openly licensed.
The set itself, with its sources, is on the proverbs page.
What you may do without asking
To put the practical part in one place:
- Quote any text on the site for scholarly, educational or critical purposes, with attribution and an accurate citation.
- Link to any page. Deep links are welcome and stable.
- Use the bibliographic data — titles, publishers, years, ISBNs, page counts. Facts are nobody’s property, and this data was assembled precisely so that it could be cited.
- Use the recognition percentages and the Somali proverbs from the dataset.
- Read the whole site from the Wayback Machine if this address is ever unreachable. Every content page is archived there.
Everything else — reprinting a whole text, republishing the translations in bulk, commercial use of any kind — write first.
How to cite this site
For a page that exists only here:
Kapchits, G. L. [page title]. Kapchits.Online, [year]. URL: [address] (accessed [date]).
For a text first published elsewhere, cite the original edition; the foot of each such page gives it. The dataset:
Kapchits, G. L. Somali proverbs with recognition rates [dataset]. Kapchits.Online, 2026. URL: https://www.kapchits.online/assets/data/proverbs.json
Material by other authors
Some pages reproduce or quote work by other people: reviews of Dr. Kapchits’ books, interviews conducted by Somali publications, articles by colleagues. Such material is published here with attribution to its author and to the publication in which it first appeared, as part of the scholarly record.
Rights in those texts belong to their authors and publishers. If you hold rights in a material published here and object to its presence, or find the attribution incomplete or wrong, write to us and it will be corrected or removed promptly.
Errors and corrections
This is a scholarly site, and the record matters more than appearances. If you find a factual error, a misattributed text, a wrong date or a mistranscribed proverb, please report it — corrections are made openly rather than quietly.
Privacy
The site sets no accounts, has no login, no comment system and no forms. It asks you for nothing and stores nothing you type.
Two external services are used, and it is fair to say plainly what they see:
- Google Analytics collects aggregate statistics about visits — pages viewed, approximate region, type of device — and sets its own cookies. It is used to see which materials are read, nothing more. You can prevent it entirely with a browser extension or a tracker-blocking setting.
- A visitor counter (hits.sh) counts page views on the server side; the request is sent without a referrer. If the service is unavailable, the counter simply disappears from the page.
No data is sold, shared or combined with anything else. Correspondence sent to the address on the Contact page is used only to answer it.
External links
Links to other sites are given for reference. We do not control their content and are not responsible for it.
Hosting
The site is a set of static files served by GitHub Pages. Access logs are kept by that service under its own terms.