LINGram 167: Grammar of the Kurmanji or Kurdish Language

 

E.B. Soane

The languages of Kurdistan are principally dialects of a main tongue termed by the Kurds Kurmānjī, originally Kurdmahī, where the syllable mah has been thought to to mean ‘Mede’, a fact that supports the theory that the Kurds are the descendants of the Medes. Kurmānjī and its most important branches, Southern Hakkārī and Mukrī, Bābān and Sulaimānia in the South and Northern Hakkārī, Erzerūm and Bāyazid dialects in the North, are spoken by four or five million speakers.

It was not so long ago that Kurdish was described by travellers as a harsh jargon, a very corrupt dialect of Persian, unintelligible to any but the folk who spoke it naturally; or again by others as an artificial language composed of Persian, Armenian and Turkish words. It is neither of these. A little research proves it to be as worthy of the name of a separate and developed language as Turkish or Persian themselves. The early Medes and Persians spoke two closely related languages ( Medic or Avestic and Old Persian), but the two tongues have grown further apart than it was originally the case. While Persian has adopted almost as great a proportion of Arabic words as our own Anglo-Saxon did of Latin and Greek words to form modern English, Kurdish, eschewing importations, has kept parallel, but on different lines of grammar; and while frequently adopting a phrase or turn of expression from its sister language, has retained an independence of form and style that marks it as a tongue as different from the artificial Persian (adapted from the preface).



Contents:

Part I

The Alphabet and Pronunciation, The Parts of Speech, The noun, the Pronouns, The Adjective, The Verb ( The Auxiliaries ‘to be’ and ‘to become’, Regular Verbs/Regular Compound Verbs/Irregular Verbs, The Casual Verb, The Verbs in –āwā, Defecive Verbs), The Adverb, The Conjunctions, The Prepositions.

Part II

Idiomatic Uses, Oblique Narrative, Nouns: Plural in Nouns (Agreement of Plural in Nouns and Verbs, Dative Case in Nouns, Government of Nouns by prepositions, Consecutive and Chaldean Genitives, Compound Locatives), Pronouns: The Suffixial Pronouns of the Southern Group, Construction of Sentences, Comparisons of Southern and Northern Group dialects in Prose and Poetry, Prosody, Vocabulary.

Re-edition. Written in English. Originally published 1913 in London.

ISBN 9783862888009. LINCOM Gramatica 167. 289pp. 2012.