Somali Proverbs Research

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

A collection tells you what editors have gathered. It does 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.

The experiment

Conducted between 1999 and 2001 with the support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1999, at the Free University of Berlin in 2001, and in Aarhus in 2001.

The starting pool was the compiler’s own dictionary of 1998 — over six thousand paremias drawn from 25 books and more than a hundred oral sources, the earliest of them Reinisch’s Die Somali-Sprache of 1900.

The corpus was reduced through successive lists to 656 proverbs, each cut off after its opening.

The informants were 45 in number — 32 men and 13 women, in three age groups — and were asked to complete the truncated proverbs.

What came out

Of 29,520 possible completions, 12,342 were filled in correctly: 41.8%. That is far below the equivalent American (88.8%) and Hungarian (82.5%) experiments, and the gap has no confident explanation.

249 paremias were known to more than half of the informants. These form the core — the first paremiological minimum established for a language of the Horn of Africa.

The results carried a second finding, sociolinguistic rather than paremiological: proverb knowledge rises with age and with education, is higher among men, and is markedly higher among speakers who grew up in a nomadic environment — 365 proverbs against 261 for those raised in towns.

Published as Hubsiimo hal baa la siistaa (Moscow, 2002). The title is itself a proverb: to know something for sure, one would even part with a she-camel.

Variants and variations

A second paper, given at the 9th Congress of the Somali Studies International Association in Aalborg in 2004, drew a distinction the material forced on the analysis:

• a variation is a deviation that does not affect the general meaning;
• a variant modifies the meaning, and may amount to a separate proverb with a different application.

Within that frame the deviations fall into grammatical modifications (morphological and phonetic, syntactic, modal), lexical substitutions, reductions and expansions. Lumping them together obscures what is happening: despite the abundance of variants, a common Somali proverbial stock exists, and its core is the paremiological minimum.

Where to read the work itself

• Some results of the Somali paremiological experiment — the fullest account of the method, given at Leiden in 2003
• Variants and Variations of Somali Proverbs — Aalborg, 2004
• Paremias without sentence particles — on the seven per cent of the corpus that preserves an older grammar
• Research Projects — the experiment alongside the dictionary, kinship terminology and dialect work
• Books — the collections themselves, with imprints

On truthfulness

One proverb gave a book its title: Soomaalidu been way sheegtaa, beense ma maahmaahdo — “Somalis can lie, but their lie will never become a proverb.” The 2012 collection built on it takes up the question of what it means for a proverb to be true.

The proverbs shown on this site

One appears on the front page each time it is loaded; the whole set, with its sources, is listed under The proverbs shown on this site.