0.1. The place of Somali in the genetic classification of African languages….. 7
Georgi Kapchits
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sentence particles in the Somali language
and their usage in proverbs
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Semitica et Semitohamitica Berolinensia
for my wife Tatiana Saburova
Contents
Preface............................................................................................................... 5
0. Introduction................................................................................................... 7
0.1. The place of Somali in the genetic classification of African languages….. 7
0.2 The aims of the investigation................................................................ 8
0.3. A short sketch of the Somali language................................................. 9
0.4. Sentence particles and the focus system in the Somali language........ 20
Chapter 1. The sentence particle waa....................................................... 30
1.1. The functions of the particle waa....................................................... 30
1.2. The subject in a sentence with the particle waa................................ 30
1.3. The particle waa with short subjective pronouns............................ 32
1.4. The order of words in a sentence with the particle waa.................... 34
1.5. The particle waa and the agreement of the predicate with the subject 39
1.6. Waa as a particle introducing a nominal predicate........................... 42
1.7. Sentences without the particle waa................................................... 44
Chapter 2. The sentence particle baa.......................................................... 45
2.1. The functions of the particle baa....................................................... 45
2.2. Case and tone in a sentence with the particle baa............................. 46
2.3. The particle baa with short subjective pronouns.............................. 47
2.4. The order of words in a sentence with the particle baa..................... 50
2.5. The particle baa and the agreement of the predicate with the subject 56
2.6. The particle baa in special syntactic constructions........................... 63
2.7. Sentences without the particle baa.................................................... 64
Chapter 3. The sentence particle waxaa.................................................... 66
3.1. The functions of the particle waxaa................................................... 66
3.2. The particle waxaa with the short subjective pronouns.................... 68
3.3. The particle waxaa and the agreement of the predicate with the subject 69
3.4. Special cases of the usage of the particle waxaa............................... 74
3.5. Two points of view on the particle waxaa........................................ 75
3.6. Sentences with two sentence particles............................................... 79
Chapter 4. Sentence particles in proverbs and proverbial phrases........ 83
4.1. Some peculiarities of Somali paremias............................................. 83
4.2. Types of Somali paremias................................................................ 85
4.3. Preliminary notes on research into the sentence particles in proverbs and proverbial phrases..................................................................................................... 89
4.4. The particle waa in proverbs and proverbial phrases........................ 92
4.5. The particle baa in proverbs and proverbial phrases........................ 98
4.6. The particle waxaa in proverbs and proverbial phrases.................. 106
4.7. Paremias without sentence particles................................................ 110
6. Bibliography.............................................................................................. 126
Preface
This book is the text of my Ph.D. thesis which was submitted to and accepted by the Institute of Asian and African Studies of Moscow State University in 2000. I am grateful to Professor Viktor Porkhomovski who talked me into writing it and provided me with most valuable supervision. I am indebted to Professors Nelly Gromova and Irina Toporova, as well as to Assistant Professor Yuliya Suyetina, for their useful advice and comments.
Since its first presentation the text of the thesis has been slightly shortened and some revisions have been made thanks to the insightful suggestions of Professors Giorgio Banti and Rainer Voigt, who read the manuscript. I wish to thank them both for their generosity to a colleague.
I am also thankful to Abdirahman Farah ‘Barwaaqo’ for his unwavering readiness to answer my numerous questions.
It is a special pleasure to express my gratitude to Sheila Andrzejewski who edited the English text of the manuscript and made a number of wise notes, which I took into consideration.
Finally I have to thank the German Research Society which provided me with a grant and Dr. Mohamed Mohamud Handule who financially supported the publication of this book.
x x x
One of the Somali proverbs demonstrating the syntactical mode of the formation of the comparative degree, described in 4.7.2, goes: Subax iyo sadar, subax baa badan – Days (lit.: mornings) are more than lines (in the Koran) [i.e. by reading a line a day one can learn the whole Sacred Book]. I have to acknowledge that during forty years, my daily learning of “the book” of the Somali syntax has left as yet many unread pages.
It is possible that this work, which reflects my current notion about one of the most important aspects of the Somali syntax, that is, the actual division of the sentence, contains hypotheses which need further consideration. But I have no doubt as to the correctness of the absolute majority of the observations and conclusions made here.
0. Introduction
0.1. The place of Somali in the genetic classification of African languages.
Somali belongs to the eastern group of the Cushitic languages, which are a part of the Afroasiatic (Hamito-Semitic) language family. This language is spoken by the nomadic Somali people who inhabit the Horn of Africa. In colonial times the territory of the Somalis was divided into several parts. In 1960 two of these, British Somaliland and Italian Somalia, were united as the independent Somali Republic, which after the Revolution of 1969 was transformed into the Somali Democratic Republic. This existed until 1991 when the President (and in fact dictator) Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown, and since then there have been no nationwide structures in Somalia. In several regions self-proclaimed states have appeared, and other areas have fallen under the control of the leaders of military-political groupings created according to clan (tribal) affiliations.
Thousands of Somalis who left the country after the collapse of the state have settled in Europe and North America. Traditionally Somalis also inhabit the southern part of Jibouti, the Ethiopian province of Hararge and Bale (Ogaden), now Somali Region, and the north-east of Kenya. According to different estimates the number of people speaking Somali is between 4 and 10 million (Saed, 1984; Strani mira, 1989; Orwin, 1994).
The nearest linguistic relatives of Somali are Bayso, Boni, Rendille, Arbore, Elmolo and Dasenech, the speakers of which live in the north-west of Kenya and the south-west of Ethiopia. Apart from Somali, the main East Cushitic languages are Oromo and Afar, spoken by the neighbours of the Somalis in the Horn of Africa.
0.1.1. In contemporary africanistics the Somali language is regarded as a bundle of closely related dialects. Lamberti (1986) distinguishes five main dialects and dialect groups: the group of Northern dialects spoken mainly by nomads; May together with Digil, the dialect groups of the settled population occupied in agriculture between the Jubba and Shabelle rivers; the dialects of Benadir spoken mainly by Somalis living along the southern coast of the Indian Ocean; and Ashraf, used by the residents of Mogadishu and also by Somalis living in Merka and on the cost between these two towns.
The Northern dialects (Isak, Darod, Majarten and others) and Benadir are usually called the Maxaad-tiri dialects spoken by the majority of Somalis. They are the bases for the so-called Standard Somali which has been rapidly forming since the introduction of the Somali script in 1972.
0.2. The aims of the investigation
The aims of this investigation are:
1) To determine the semantic and functional characteristics of the sentence particles and their role in the actual division of the sentence;
2) To consider the specificity of the realization of focus in different types of clichés;
3) To reveal the system of rheme-making in synchrony (on the material of non-clichéized sentences) and in diachrony (on the material of proverbial structures).
An investigation of the problems related to the functioning of the sentence particles in Somali cannot be done without referring to information from practically all sections of the grammar of this far from fully investigated language. For this reason an analysis of the sentence particles has to be preceded by a number of related aspects of the Somali language.
0.3. A short sketch of the Somali language
0.3.1. Somali, mainly in its "Northern variant", as determined by Hyman (1981), is a tonal accent language which assigns accents to vowels. Three tones are distinguished: high, low and falling, but the prosodic characteristics of Somali speech are not designated in the adopted system of script. The absence of diacritical marks makes it impossible to differentiate the meaning of those words which differ only by tone or tonal accent (for details see Kapchits, Keenadiid, 1996). In linguistic literature (Andrzejewski, 1955, 1964, 1968, 1979; Lamberti, 1983; Banti, 1984; Saeed (1984, 1999) tones are marked in the following way: high tone á, falling tone à or â; the low tone is not marked.
In Somali the lexical meaning, number and gender of some nouns can be differentiated only by tone:[1]
gées (side) – gèes (horn),
Soomáali (a Somali) – Soomaalí (Somalis),
damèer (he-donkey) – daméer (she-donkey).
Tone is also used as a grammatical marker, differentiating in particular the subject and non-subject when the former is not marked bay baa.
0.3.2. Nouns and verbs are the main classes of words in Somali, and only they are characterized by inflexion which is almost completely suffixal (however see below concerning the preverbal particles). Some words with attributive meanings belong to the class of verbs:
dheer – to be long,
cad – to be white, etc.
The others form a not very numerous class of unchangeable attributes:
dhexe – middle,
hoose – lower,
shanaad – fifth, etc.
The majority of words with adverbial meaning belong to the class of nouns:
hoos-ta – bottom,
si-da – mode, mean.
Cardinal numerals, demonstrative and personal (emphatic) pronouns and some others are subclasses of nouns. All of them, in particular, can adjoin a definite article. Particles, including sentence particles, make a special class of words.
0.3.3. In Somali, as in many languages, nouns have a lexical-grammatical (classifying) category of gender – masculine and feminine. The categories of number, case, definiteness and possession are inflectional.
Singular and plural forms are distinguished. There are three persons in the singular and four in the plural: 1st person exclusive (a speaker and somebody else, but not a listener), 1st person inclusive (a speaker and other people, including a listener), 2nd person and 3rd person.
Nouns are divided, according to the regular formation of their plurals, into six (Bell, 1953) or seven (Andrzejewski, 1979; Puglielli and Ciise, 1984; Orwin, 1995; Saeed, 1999; et al.) classes or declensions. The formation of the plural is mainly suffixal (in only one class is it gemination):
míis (table) – miisas (tables),
nín (man) – niman (men), etc.
The majority of nouns change gender in the plural (the so-called principle of polarity). Some, however, do so only formally. When defined, they adjoin the articles of the opposite gender, but in fact retain the original one (see 0.3.11 and 2.5.3).
The use of morphological markers added to the noun (or to the last word of a noun phrase), and/or tone, enables four cases to be distinguished: nominative (subjective), general oblique (objective)[2], genitive and vocative. Subjects which are not marked as logically accented by means of baa or waxaa are in the subjective case.
(1) Nín baa naagi aragtay – A woman (nom.) saw a man.
Subjects which are logically accented are in the general oblique case:
(2) Náag báa nín aragtáy – A woman (obl.) saw a man.
Many forms of the nominative, general oblique and genitive cases are homonymic. The specific markers of the nominative are -i, -u; of the genitive -eed (fem. sing.), -ood (fem.pl.); and of the vocative -ow (masc.), -oy, -ey (fem.). These case markers depend on the usage of sentence particles, and are obligatory only in a few positions (see 1.2 and 2.2). In all other positions the form of the general oblique case can be used.
Somali nouns have the category of definiteness. An indefinite article is marked by zero, while a definite article is added to a noun as a suffix, and marks its gender. The form of the article depends on the last phoneme of its stem.
The variants of the definite article for masculine nouns are -ka, -ga, -ha, -a:
dal – dalka (the country),
derbi – derbiga (the wall),
habro – habraha (the old women),
ubax – ubaxa (the flower).
The variants of the definite articles for feminine nouns are -ta, -da, -sha:
naag – naagta (the woman),
lo' – lo'da (the cows),
kuul – kuusha[3] (the necklace).
In the article -dha (gabadh – gabadh-dha with the meaning of ‘the girl’), the consonant dh (a voiced retroflex plosive) has emerged as a result of the assimilation of the consonant of the article -ta to the final consonant of the stem. In the adopted system of writing, the dh of the article is omitted.
An important characteristic of Somali nouns is their incapacity to govern more than one dependent noun. This noun is marked by the genitive case.
0.3.4. The Somali verb is characterized by the inflectional categories of person, number, tense, mood, and its morphology also marks the sentence type in which it occurs (affirmative, interrogative, negative, etc). Conjugation by person (1st, 2nd and 3rd) and number (singular and plural) is mainly suffixal. The above-mentioned attributive verbs make some plural forms by gemination:
wiil yar (a boy who is small) – wiilal yaryar (boys who are small),
or by a combination of gemination and suffixation:
wuu weynaa (he was big) – way waaweynaayeen (they were big).
Some linguists relate the Somali attributive verbs to the class of adjectives which are used in combination with the verb ahaan – to be. Convincing arguments disproving such a conclusion have been set out by Antinucci and Puglielli (1980).
Five archaic verbs (ahaan – to be, odhan – to say, iman – to come, aqoon – to know, ooli – to be in a place) have a prefixal-suffixal conjugation (as in Semitic languages).
There are seven tenses: present general, present progressive, past general, past progressive, past habitual, past independent and future. The verbal forms of the past habitual and future tenses are formed analytically, with the help of auxiliary verbs. In some tenses the verb conjugation depends on the choice of a sentence particle and its place in the sentence (see the corresponding sections of chapters 1, 2 and 3).
0.3.5. An important feature of the Somali syntax is a special category of preverbs (u – to, towards, for, ku – in, on, at, to, into, by means of, ka – at, from, away, out of, about, la – with, together with) which belong to the system of preverbal particles and serve as conductors of the government from verb to objects. Their place is fixed in regard to the predicate and other particles, which precede the verb, but not in regard to other components of the sentence. This means that the position of the preverb is determined by the verb and is in no way bound up with the place occupied by the objects themselves.
As well as the preverbs in preposition to the verb, there are short subjective and objective pronouns and adverbial particles. The use of objective pronouns is obligatory if there are valencies for them. The absence of the object in a position where it is syntactically necessary indicates the 3rd person singular or plural and is expressed by a zero marker (more details about this will be given in connection with the theory of the origin of the sentence particle baa[4]). There can be only one short objective pronoun in preposition to the verb.
0.3.6. The numerous class of particles in Somali also includes sentence, negative, interrogative and conjunctive ones. In connection with sentence particles only the latter will be mentioned, as the types of sentences originated with the help of negative and interrogative particles are not examined in this book.
The conjunctive particles (conjunctions) are always placed between coordinated members with the exception of the enclitic conjunctions ee – and (in a certain context), na – and, se – but, and. The subordinate conjunctions maxaa yeelay and waayo, with the meaning of ‘because’, as well as hase yeeshee (variants: hase yeelee and hase ahaate) – ‘but’, link only full independent sentences.