Somali Grammar & Syntax

The centre of this work is a single feature of Somali syntax: the sentence particles. Practically every independent, simple, affirmative sentence in Somali carries one of them. That obligatoriness is what makes the system a grammatical mechanism rather than a stylistic option, and it is what a learner has to master before anything else falls into place.

The three particles

The particles form a paradigm of three members — waa, baa (with its variant ayaa) and waxaa. That the paradigm has three members and not two was established by A. K. Zholkovsky, and B. W. Andrzejewski regarded it as the most valuable finding of Zholkovsky’s Syntax of Somali (1971).

What each does:

Each was first described on its own, in a set of three articles published a year apart — Logical Accent in Somali: Phrase Particle waa (Moscow, 1997), …Phrase Particle baa (Moscow, 1998) and …Phrase Particle waxaa (Moscow, 1999). They are listed in full under Articles & Papers.

The three are then treated together in Sentence Particles in the Somali Language and Their Usage in Proverbs — chapter by chapter, with their behaviour in respect of case and tone, of the short pronouns, of word order, and of predicate agreement, along with the special constructions each allows and the sentences in which each is absent. A separate section addresses the two competing accounts of waxaa, and the sentences that carry two particles at once.

The proverbs, and what they preserve

The second half of the book turns to the paremiological corpus — about ten thousand proverbs and proverbial phrases — and asks how the particles behave there.

Proverbs are not ordinary sentences. They are shaped by alliteration, by scansion, and by syntactic parallelism, and these pressures act on the grammar. Following G. L. Permyakov’s classification, twelve types of cliché are distinguished within the Somali proverbial stock, and waa, baa and waxaa are examined in each.

Then comes the finding the whole book builds towards.

Paremias without particles

In roughly seven per cent of the corpus the particles are simply absent, in constructions where they would otherwise be obligatory. Andrzejewski had noted the phenomenon in his 1986 review of the 1983 collection; the question was what it meant.

The obvious explanation — ellipsis, a particle “dropped” for brevity or metre — turns out to be wrong for part of the material. The constructions in which particles are missing fall into distinct groups:

Crucially, these groups do not behave alike when one tries to put a particle back. In some, baa can be reconstructed without damage. In others it can be reconstructed only in certain variants. In a third group it cannot be reconstructed at all.

That third group is the interesting one. If a particle cannot be restored even in principle, the construction cannot be a reduced form of the modern pattern — it must predate it. These paremias are the oldest stratum of the Somali proverbial stock: language from before baa became a focus particle, preserved because a proverb is repeated verbatim rather than reformulated.

One more observation cuts across the whole picture: archaic and ordinary forms coexist in the variants of one and the same proverb. The old grammar has not been replaced so much as it has been kept alongside the new.

Where this was published

The study began as a dissertation defended at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University, in 2000, under the supervision of Prof. V. Ya. Porkhomovsky; the manuscript was read by Giorgio Banti and Rainer Voigt, and the English was checked by Sheila Andrzejewski. It appeared as a book from Shaker Verlag, Aachen, in 2005, in the series Semitica et Semitohamitica Berolinensia.

The section on particle-free paremias was also given as a separate paper, Paremias without sentence particles, at the 7th International Semito-Hamitic Congress in Berlin. See Conferences & Congresses.

Dialects

Somali dialects are conventionally divided, following Marcello Lamberti, into five groups: Northern Somali proper, Darod, Benadir, Maay and Digil. Field interviews in more than thirty settlements of southern Somalia indicate that at least the Darod and Benadir maps now require serious revision — see Research Projects.