The proverbs shown on this site

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

Six are quoted in papers published on this site, and can be read there in context. The rest come from Hubsiimo hal baa la siistaa (Moscow, 2002), the collection of the most commonly used Somali proverbs established by the paremiological experiment. English translations are the author’s own; the Russian lines are working renderings of his English rather than his published Russian versions.

The set replaced an earlier one in August 2026. Of the twenty-four proverbs shown here before, twenty-two could not be found anywhere in Dr. Kapchits’s corpus — they had been invented. On a site devoted to the study of Somali proverbs that was the least acceptable place for invention, and the whole set was rebuilt from attested sources.