Lexical Glossaries

Lexical work occupies a distinct place in Dr. Kapchits’ somalistics. Alongside the study of grammar and paremiology, he has assembled and published glossaries of semantic fields that had previously been described only in outline — above all the terminology of kinship, and the archaic vocabulary of fractions preserved in traditional texts.

Kinship Terminology

The fullest of these glossaries is the corpus of Somali kinship terms compiled by G. L. Kapchits together with V. Ya. Porkhomovsky and published in the Semito-Hamitic Festschrift (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 2008, pp. 155–160). The corpus comprises 34 to 38 terms.

Its significance is best measured against what came before. Until then the only reliable published list of Somali kinship terms was that of I. M. Lewis, which contained twenty items. The new corpus is therefore not a refinement of an existing description but a substantial enlargement of it, and it is the first to present the field as a system rather than as a word-list.

The hierarchy of social units

Somali terms of kinship cannot be separated from the terms for the social units within which kinship is reckoned. These form an ordered series of nested groups, running from the smallest unit to the largest:

xaas → reer → jilib → laf → qabiil

Each level of the series is contained within the one that follows it. A speaker’s position in this hierarchy determines which kinship terms are applicable and in what sense they are used.

Gaps filled by description

The system is notable as much for what it lacks as for what it contains. Somali has no simple, single-word terms for a number of relations that European languages express with a single lexeme — among them “grandson” and “nephew”. These relations are conveyed descriptively, by a phrase that spells out the intervening links of the genealogical chain rather than by a term of its own.

Vocative usage

A further peculiarity concerns address rather than reference. In the vocative, parents address their children with the very words that denote the parents themselves: aabbo “father” and hooyo “mother”. The vocative form thus names the status of the speaker, not that of the person addressed — a pattern that has to be described separately from the referential terminology, since the same lexemes serve both functions with opposite reference.

The wider comparative treatment of this material, including the confrontation of the Somali system with Oromo, is presented in the Kinship Terms research section.

Archaic Fractional Vocabulary

A second glossary emerged from work on the book Faaliyihii la bilkeyday (2006), in which Dr. Kapchits recorded a layer of archaic counting vocabulary — a set of dedicated words for fractions obtained by successive halving:

The series is of interest both lexicographically and culturally: a set of distinct, non-derived words for fractions down to a thirty-second implies a practice of division precise enough to require them, and its survival in traditional texts is a reminder that oral literature preserves vocabulary that everyday modern speech has let fall out of use.

Method

Both glossaries follow the same principle that governs Dr. Kapchits’ paremiological work: terms are not collected in isolation but verified against the usage of native speakers and against the evidence of texts, and the description records the system’s asymmetries — its gaps, its periphrases, its shifts of reference — rather than smoothing them away for the sake of a tidy paradigm.