Somalistics

This section is about the language itself: how the sentence is built, particular areas of the vocabulary, and where Somali sits within the Cushitic family. Proverbs and folktales as a tradition are gathered under Publications; here the question is how they are put together.

Two lines of work hold each other up. The first is the grammar of the sentence, the second the collecting of proverbs. Neither stands alone: proverbs preserve grammatical forms that have dropped out of present-day speech, and the grammar explains what a proverb is actually asserting.

Sections

Grammar & Syntax

The sentence particle system — waa, baa (and ayaa) and waxaa — and the most archaic stratum, surviving in the proverbs.

Lexical Glossaries

Kinship terminology, recorded together with V. Ya. Porkhomovsky, and the archaic vocabulary of fractions preserved in folklore texts.

Media & Broadcasting

The Somali service of Radio Moscow and Voice of Russia, and the four essays from the 2009 journey to Somalia.

The sentence particle system

Practically every independent affirmative sentence carries one of three particles: waa, baa (with its variant ayaa) and waxaa. This is not optional emphasis but an obligatory grammatical mechanism, distinguishing what the sentence is about from what is being said about it.

That the system has three members and not two was established by A. K. Zholkovsky in Syntax of Somali (Moscow, 1971). Each particle was then described separately, in three articles published a year apart in Moscow — on waa in 1997, baa in 1998 and waxaa in 1999 — before the account was drawn together into Sentence Particles in the Somali Language and Their Usage in Proverbs (Shaker Verlag, Aachen, 2005), which grew out of a dissertation defended at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University, in 2000.

Proverbs and archaic grammar

In roughly seven per cent of the recorded Somali proverbs there is no sentence particle at all — even in constructions where one is normally obligatory. In part of them no particle can be reconstructed, which points to the oldest stratum of the proverbial stock: language older than the rule that now governs it. The analysis was published as Paremias without sentence particles (Semitica et Semitohamitica Berolinensia, Band 5, Aachen, 2007).

Vocabulary

The largest of the glossaries is the list of kinship terms, brought to 34–38 entries against the twenty in I. M. Lewis’s list, until then the only reliable source. It came out of comparative work on Somali and Oromo carried out with V. Ya. Porkhomovsky. Details on the Lexical Glossaries page.

Dialects

Marcello Lamberti’s maps divide Somali into five dialect groups. Field interviews in more than thirty settlements of southern Somalia showed that at least two of those maps — Darod and Benadir — now need serious revision: the civil war set off mass migrations and the dialects mixed. Details and the practical application on the Research Projects page.

Where to begin

For students, and for anyone taking this up seriously, the reading order and what to expect from the grammar are set out on the For Students page.