Articles & Papers

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.

2017–2021: Bildhaan and Vostok

The author’s bibliography on the old site stopped in 2009. These later papers come from the author’s own materials received in August 2026; the texts are in the project archive.

• 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 have been asked of the author; the full text is in the project archive.
• «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.

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
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.
9. 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. → full text
10. 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

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:

• Some results of the Somali paremiological experiment — Leiden, 2003
• Variants and Variations of Somali Proverbs — Aalborg, 2004
• Paremias without sentence particles — Berlin, 2004
• On some peculiarities of the Somali language, proverbs and folktales — San Diego, 2007
• Men and women in the Somali narrative folklore — San Diego, 2007
• Lamberti’s maps of Somali dialects
• The Country of Poets and Pirates — 2009
• Drought in Somali Folklore — Afrikan Sarvi, 1/2012
• Kinship Terms in Somali and Oromo — with V. Ya. Porkhomovsky
• Introduction to Aliqeyr Mohamed Nur’s Dhibkii Dheef Baa Ka Dambaysay — Omhassan Publisher, c. 2014

Books are listed separately: Books.