Saladin's English-Kurdish Dictionary

Preface

To begin with : I am not a lexicographer and when I undertook the task of what has turned out to be Saladin’s English-Kurdish Dictionary, I was also “ plunging into the sea of lexicography without having been first taught to swim ”.

It all started with The Diplomat, James Aldridge’s novel, which I translated in 1984. The translation left me with a list of nearly 4 000 English-Kurdish key words, arranged alphabetically for easy reference. Sensing the acute need for a lexicon, the list was developed first into a concise dictionary of 25 000 syllables, then into what I presume to be a comprehensive one with around 80 000 syllables.

The task was certainly daunting. It is of course an understatement to say that Kurdish, though an ancient (probably pre-Sumerian) language spoken now by close to thirty million people throughout Kurdistan, is not as rich as English in vocabulary, but armed with the fact that both belong to the Indo-European family of languages, I was able to make extensive use of etymology and morphology to form, if necessary, new words. Thus, it sounded natural to coi (heştpê) for (octupus), and respective suffixes for (ion) and (ing), namely (bûn) and (kir(d)in) helped to derive hundreds of nouns and terms from the verbs. The Kurdish suffix (îtî) which is fortunately identical with the English (ity), was particularly helpful.

Furthermore, as I proceeded in my uncharted endeavour, I discovered that quite a few English words were similar to Kurdish, for exemple, brow (biro), cat (kitik), chick (çîçik), curve (kirv), drop (dilop), egg (hêk), eve (êvar), game (geme), gene (cîn), gully (gelî), jungle (cengel), lip (lêv), ma (mother) (mak), moon (mang), navel (nafk), new (nû, nî), no (ne), patch (pate), river (rûbar), road (rê), sending (şandin), spleen (spil), star (stêr), tension (tingijîn), two (du) and type (tîp).

Literarily, Kurdish has developed into a bistandard language, namely Kurmanji and Sorani. Almost all the nouns and terms, adjectives and adverbs are bistandard. The verbs are mainly in Kurmanji, not nearly enough in Sorani, for my inadequate proficiency in the latter.

The marked variation in pronunciation, and consequently in spelling, has often been reflected, albeit reluctantly, making no determined attempt to favour a strict and premature standard, except perhaps in the plural apposition sign (yên).

As this is the first edition, it could not be free of printing errors and other shortcomings, not withstanding strenuous efforts. Corrections and suggestions are welcome in order to minimize them, hopefully, in the next edition.

S.S.

P.S. : An edition of the Dictionary was published in Baghdad in Kurdish Arabic script in 1998.