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Acknowledgments
I would like to use this opportunity to express my gratitude to Prof. Amir Hassanpour for writing the Preface for the reader. I have also benefited from the help of colleagues and friends for advice about content and structure dur-ing my work on the book. I am indebted to Dr. Pavel Basharin who kindly read the grammar outline and offered valuable comments. My deepest ex-pression of appreciation goes to Mrs. Lynne Colley (Shina) M. A. for her valuable advice and help with the English language.
Most of all, I would like to express my deepest thanks to my parents Zina and Riza Usoyan for their moral support and all the people who inspired me to publish this book.
Göttingen, Spring 2011
Khanna Omarkhali (Usoyan)
PREFACE TO THE READER BY AMIR HASSANPOUR
This is an exciting collection of texts in Kurmanji, the main dialect of the Kurdish language. It is designed to help students with a basic knowledge of the language to enhance their fluency through the study of a variety of texts ranging from literary and folklore to non-narrative prose works. My goal in this preface is to place the readings in the context of the troubled history of the language, to map the place of Kurdish in the emerging world linguistic order, and to draw the contours of Kurmanji in the sociolinguistic chart of Kurdish dialects.
The Kurdish Language
In terms of the number of speakers, Kurdish ranks fortieth among the world's 6,600 to 7,000 languages.' The numerical strength of the language has, however, been undermined by the division of its speech area and speakers among five neighbouring countries of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Armenia, and the adoption, by these nation-states, of policies ranging from linguicide (Turkey 1925-1991, Iran, 1920s-1941, Syria since the mid-1960s) to tolerance (Syria in the mid-1930s and WWII to 1958) and officialization on the local level (USSR and Iraq). In this changing geopolitical environment, Kurdish is now one of the two official languages of Iraq while it is denied many rights including native-tongue education in all neighbouring countries.
Although writing, in its alphabetic forms, dates back to seven millennia ago, the majority of the languages of the world have, until quite recently, remained unwritten. At the same time, languages are extremely unequal in terms of the scope of writing and literary traditions. Although the physical landscape of Kurdistan is decorated with inscriptions in extinct ancient languages and scripts, writing in Kurdish has a more recent beginning in the sixteenth century when two dialects, Kurmanji and Hewrami, began a literary tradition, predominantly in poetic form. Later in the early nineteenth century, another dialect, named Sorani since the 1960s, developed its written tradition, followed by occasional writing in other dialects.
The three literary traditions were poetic with only a few prose works, which were mostly non-narrative. This literary spark, much like that in Azeri, Pashtu or Baluchi languages, was overshadowed by the brilliant and rich literary traditions of Arabic and Persian, the dominant classical languages ...
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