Somali

It was in 1967 that an American Abyssinian breeder, Mrs. Mague, who also worked as a volunteer in an animal shelter in New Jersey, saw "George" arrive, a superb long-haired cat. Amazed by the morphological similarities with the Abyssinian, George being neutered, Mrs. Mague decided to conduct research to find his origins. She thus traced back to a "Li-Mi-R" breeding and was amazed to discover that the parents of this cat came from her own breeding. George was the only long-haired kitten in the litter, which suggests that the birth of the Somali would be a genetic mutation, a happy "accident" of nature. Continuing her research, Mrs. Mague discovered that "long-haired Abyssinians" appeared since the 1950s. Seven breeders reportedly told her in confidence that they had long-haired Abyssinians in litters and discarded them for non-conformity to the breed standards. At about the same time a Canadian judge, Ken McGill, also discovered the presence of long-haired Abyssinians. Some think that we are not in the simple resurgence of a recessive gene (that of long hair) and give a more rational and historical explanation. Indeed, in 1976 Walter Del Pelligrino conducted in-depth research by studying the pedigrees of North American Somalis. He confirmed that all had in their ancestors a Somali of British origin, Raby Chuffa of Selene, bred by Lady Barnard and sold in 1952 to an American breeder, Mister Schuler-Taft. World War II having decimated British Abyssinian breeding, only about a dozen Abyssinians would have survived this period of crisis. British breeders were therefore authorized to practice illicit crosses with, among others, Persians (which did not have a flat face at that time), introducing the "long hair" gene into the lineages thus obtained. Whether Abyssinians or Somalis, all cats from this lineage have in common these mixed ancestors. The Somali Cat Club was created in 1972 in the United States, Mrs. Mague was elected President with the mission to have this breed recognized in all American federations. The name "Somali" refers to the country bordering Ethiopia, which is the probable country of origin of the Abyssinian. The breed was recognized in 1982 in Europe.

This breed is reputed to be intelligent. Somalis would adapt well to indoor life and would be very playful. They would also be curious and good climbers. They are described as particularly affectionate cats and are often called cat-dogs. These character traits remain, however, perfectly individual and are above all functions of each cat's history.

Somali is an agglutinative language that presents by some aspects characteristics of inflectional language. Many grammatical properties, such as aspect, tense or cases, are indicated by means of affixes. Somali has almost lost an ancient process of verbal inflection by prefixation, which is now restricted to four verbs of common use. All other verbs in the language are now inflected, in a more transparent way, by a suffixation process. The modification of syllabic melodic heights is in Somali a morphological process that serves more to flexion than to derivation. Among the flexional morphological properties affected by this process are gender, number and case. It happens that the value of these properties is marked only by tones or accents: thus for the category of gender in ínan, "boy" compared to inán, "girl". Somali has two series of pronouns: some, stressed, are independent; others are clitics and attach to verbal forms. Independent pronouns behave syntactically as nouns and generally carry the suffixed article -ka/-ta (thus adi-ga, "you", where a sandhi phenomenon causes the transition from -ka to -ga). It happens, however, that the article is omitted, when the pronoun is marked by a conjunction or a focus particle: thus in adna (composed only of adi- and the conjunction -na) meaning "and you…". Clitic pronouns attach to the verb and cannot receive any morphology specific to the noun. Somali, like several other eastern Cushitic languages such as Rendille or Daasanach, distinguishes an "inclusive we" ("me and you (and others)") from an "exclusive we" ("me and others without you"). Somali, like a number of other Afro-Asiatic languages, experiences the phenomenon known as "gender polarity": a plural noun generally causes agreement in the opposite gender to that of its singular. Thus, the plural of the masculine noun dibi (m.), "bull" is obtained by its sole conversion to a feminine noun: dibi (f.), "bulls". Somali has the unusual property among world languages of marking the subject in case without marking the object in case (this property is found in other Cushitic languages, such as Oromo).