The Mukri Variety of Central Kurdish
Ergin Öpengin
Ludwig Reichert
The present work is a grammatical description of the Mukri variety of Central Kurdish accompanied by a ’collection of texts and a brief lexicon. More theoretical aspects of person marking and argument indexation patterns in Central Kurdish are presented in a companion volume currently being prepared for publication (Öpengin forthc.) Central Kurdish, more widely known as Sorani, is one of the major varieties of Kurdish, itself a branch of Western Iranian languages (cf Kom 2003) Central Kurdish is spoken in Iraq and Iran by the majority of the Kurdish population in these two countries McCarus (2009:587) estimates the number of its speakers as around 5 million, while in Lewis, Simons & Fennig (2013) the number is more specifically stated as 6,750,000. This background chapter presents the language and the speech community under study (§1.2); the position of the variety within Kurdish dialectology (§1.3); a synopsis of previous work (§1.4); a description ...
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments / 5
List of Tables / 12
List of Figures / 12
Abbreviations and Symbols / 13
Chapter 1
Background to The Language, Community, and Fieldwork / 15
1.1 Introduction / 15
1.2 Mukri Central Kurdish and its speech community / 15
1.3 The status of Mukri within Kurdish dialectology / 18
1.4 Previous work on Mukri and Central Kurdish / 20
1.5 Fieldwork / 21
1.6 Corpus / 22
Chapter 2
The Grammar of Mukri Central Kurdish / 25
2.1 Introduction / 25
2.2 Phonology / 25
2.2.1 Phoneme system / 25
2.2.1.1 Vowel phonemes / 25
2.2.1.2 Consonant phonemes / 26
2.2.1.3 Description of phonemes and non-contrastive variation / 28
2.2.1.3.1 Stops and nasals / 29
2.2.1.3.2 Fricatives and affricates / 31
2.2.1.3.3 Rhotics / 33
2.2.1.3.4 Approximants / 33
2.2.1.3.5 Vowels / 34
2.2.1.4 Phoneme - grapheme associations / 37
2.2.2 Phonotactics / 38
2.2.2.1 Phoneme distribution / 38
2.2.2.2 Syllable structure / 38
2.2.2.3 Stress / 39
2.2.3 Major morphophonemic processes / 41
2.2.3.1 Pharyngealization / 41
2.2.3.2 Glide insertion / 42
2.2.3.3 Anaptyctic vowel insertion / 42
2.2.3.4 Metathesis / 42
2.2.3.5 Velar palatalization / 42
2.2.3.6 Contraction / 43
2.3 The morphosyntax of Mukri Central Kurdish / 44
2.3.1 Overview of the clause / 44
2.3.1.1 Simple clauses / 44
2.3.1.2 Copular clauses and similar constructions / 46
2.3.1.3 Grammatical functions and argument indexing / 48
2.3.1.4 Basic word order in the clause / 50
2.3.2 Nouns and noun morphology / 51
2.3.2.1 Nouns / 51
2.3.2.1.1 Remnant gender classes in nouns / 52
2.3.2.2 Noun derivation / 53
2.3.2.2.1 Affixation / 53
2.3.2.2.2 Compounding / 54
2.3.2.3 Local nouns / 55
2.3.2.4 Nominal inflectional morphology / 56
2.3.2.4.1 Indefiniteness suffix -ek/-ek / 56
2.3.2.4.2 Definiteness / 57
2.3.2.4.2.1 Definite suffix -eke / 57
2.3.2.4.2.2 Demonstrative clitic -e (dem.cl) / 60
2.3.2.4.3 Case, number, and gender marking / 61
2.3.2.4.3.1 Vocative case / 63
2.3.2.4.3.2 Gender marking / 64
2.3.3 Verbs and verb morphology / 64
2.3.3.1 Bare verbs and their stems / 64
2.3.3.2 Derivation of new verb meanings / 66
2.3.3.2.1 Preverbal derivation / 66
2.3.3.2.2 Adposition and pronoun incorporation / 67
2.3.3.2.3 Light verb constructions / 68
2.3.3.2.4 Nominalization / 70
2.3.3.2.5 The transitivizing suffix -and / 71
2.3.3.2.6 Passivization suffixes -rê/-ra / 72
2.3.3.2.7 Aspectual morpheme -ewe / 72
2.3.3.3 Verbal inflection: tense-aspect-mood and person / 73
2.3.3.3.1 Inventory of aspect-mood and negation markers / 73
2.3.3.3.1.1 Indicative and imperfective de- / 74
2.3.3.3.1.2 Irrealis bi- / 74
2.3.3.3.1.3 Negation prefixes nd-, ne-, and prohibitive me- / 74
2.3.3.3.1.4 Order/interactions of aspect-mood-negation prefixes / 75
2.3.3.3.2 Person agreement marking / 75
2.3.3.3.3 Verb forms of grammaticalized tense-aspect-moods / 76
2.3.3.3.3.1 Indicative present / 76
2.3.3.3.3.2 Past perfective / preterite / 76
2.3.3.3.3.3 Past imperfective / 76
2.3.3.3.3.4 Present perfect / 77
2.3.3.3.3.5 Past perfect / 78
2.3.3.3.3.6 Imperative and prohibitive / 79
2.3.3.3.3.7 Present subjunctive / 79
2.3.3.3.3.8 Past subjunctive / 80
2.3.3.3.3.9 Perfective counterfactual / 81
2.3.3.3.4 Periphrastic tense-aspect-mood expressions / 81
2.3.3.3.4.1 Progressive and prospective ‘xerik + copula’ / 81
2.3.3.3.4.2 Future auxiliary / 82
2.3.3.3.4.3 TAM function of demonstrative complex / 83
2.3.3.3.4.4 Modality constructions / 84
2.3.4 Adjectives and adverbs / 84
2.3.4.1 Adjectives / 84
2.3.4.1.1 Basic adjectives / 85
2.3.4.1.2 Adjective derivation / 86
2.3.4.1.3 Comparison of adjectives / 88
2.3.4.2 Adverbs / 89
2.3.5 Minor word classes / 91
2.3.5.1 Pronouns / 91
2.3.5.1.1 Clitic person markers / 91
2.3.5.1.2 Independent personal pronouns / 94
2.3.5.1.3 Indefinite pronouns / 96
2.3.5.1.4 Impersonals and honorifics / 97
2.3.5.2 Deictics / 98
2.3.5.2.1 Demonstrative determiner and pronotm / 98
2.3.5.2.2 Adverbial demonstratives / 100
2.3.5.3 Adpositions / 101
2.3.5.3.1 Simple adpositions / 101
2.3.5.3.2 Absolute adpositions / 102
2.3.5.3.3 Compound adpositions / 103
2.3.5.3.4 Circumpositions / 104
2.3.5.4 Quantifiers and numerals / 105
2.3.5.4.1 Numerals / 105
2.3.5.4.2 Lexical quantifiers / 107
2.3.5.5 Classifiers / 108
2.3.5.6 Conjunctions and particles / 108
2.3.5.6.1 Conjunctions / 108
2.3.5.6.2 Discourse connectives / 109
2.3.5.6.3 Discourse particles / 109
2.3.5.6.4 Interjections / 110
2.3.6 The syntax of the noun phrase / 110
2.3.6.1 Ezafe constructions / 111
2.3.6.1.1 Unmarked-i type NPs / 111
2.3.6.1.2 Compounding e-type NPs / 112
2.3.6.1.3 The particle de in ezafe constructions / 113
2.3.6.1.4 Multiple modification / 113
2.3.6.1.5 Independent/pronominal ezafe / 113
2.3.6.2 Adnominal possession / 114
2.3.6.3 Relative clauses / 114
2.3.7 Clausal Syntax / 116
2.3.7.1 Alignment and argument-indexing / 116
2.3.7.2 Argument structure / 117
2.3.7.3 The order of arguments / 118
2.3.7.4 Topicalization and focus / 120
2.3.7.5 Reflexive and reciprocal clauses / 123
2.3.7.6 Passive clauses / 124
2.3.7.7 Interrogative clauses / 125
2.3.7.7.1 Polar questions / 125
2.3.7.7.2 Content questions / 126
2.3.7.7.3 Rhetorical and tag questions / 127
2.3.7.8 Imperative clauses / 128
2.3.8 Complex sentences / 129
2.3.8.1 Inchoative sense of hênan / 129
2.3.8.2 Clause coordination / 129
2.3.8.3 Subordination / 133
2.3.8.3.1 Complement clauses / 133
2.3.8.3.2 Conditional clauses / 135
2.3.8.3.3 Temporal adverbial clauses / 136
2.4 Summary / 137
Chapter 3
Sample Annotated Texts / 138
3.1 Introduction / 138
3.2 Text 1: Hafretyi kêye? ‘Who deserves the woman? / 138
3.3 Text 7: Feqêy mekmûs ‘The wile-writer student / 153
Chapter 4
Texts and Translations from the Mukri Oral Literature / 179
4.1 Introduction / 179
4.2 Background to the texts / 179
4.2.1 Information on the narrators of the texts in this collection / 180
4.2.2 Text presentation, transcription, symbols, and translation / 181
4.3 Individual texts / 182
4.3.1 Text 1: Hafret yî kêye? “Who deserves the woman?” / 183
4.3.2 Text 2: Nanewaza.de “The son of a baker” / 188
4.3.3 Text 3: Cil qetl ‘Forty murders’ / 199
4.3.4 Text 4: Joldy aqil ‘The intelligent weaver’ / 213
4.3.5 Text 5: Mela kullo ‘Mullah Grasshopper’ / 217
4.3.6 Text 6: Feqêy mekmûs ‘The wile-writer student’ / 233
4.3.7 Text 7: Weziri kalekfiros ‘The melon-seller vizier’ / 241
4.3.8 Text 8: Carenûs ‘Destiny’ / 248
4.3.9 Text 9: Goristanê ddrebenê ‘The Dareben cemetery’ / 263
4.3.10 Text 10: Zini bas ‘The good woman’ / 268
Chapter 5
Lexicon / 281
Introduction to the lexicon / 281
Abbreviations for the lexical entries / 282
References / 299
Appendices / 303
Appendix 1 / Map of the Kurdish dialects of Iraq and Iran / 303
List of Tables
Table 1 The corpus of spoken texts in Mukri Kurdish / 23
Table 2 Vowel phonemes / 25
Table 3 Consonant phonemes / 27
Table 4 Phoneme-grapheme associations / 37
Table 5 Copular endings / 46
Table 6 Case and number inflection / 61
Table 7 Past versus present tense stems of verbs / 65
Table 8 Verbs derived by adverbial preverbs / 66
Table 9 Common light verb constructions / 68
Table 10 Verbs derived by the transitivizing suffix -and / 71
Table 11 Verbs derived by the aspectual morpheme -ewe / 72
Table 12 Aspect-mood and negation marking formatives / 74
Table 13 Position and order of aspect-mood and negation prefixes / 75
Table 14 Person agreement markers / 75
Table 15 Semantic property types of adjectives / 85
Table 16 Semantic property types of adverbs / 89
Table 17 Clitic person markers / 92
Table 18 Independent personal pronouns / 95
Table 19 Indefinite pronouns / 96
Table 20 Simple adpositions / 101
Table 21 Absolute adpositions and their relation with simple adpositions / 102
Table 22 Cardinal numbers / 105
Table 23 Morphological marking of arguments / 116
Table 24 The structure of the verbal clause and the common word order / 120
Table 25 Metadata of the Mukri oral literature texts / 179
List of Figures
Figure 1 / Kurdish varieties and the speech zone of Mukri Central Kurdish / 14
Figure 2 / Fieldwork localities in the Mukriyan region of northwestem Iran / 22
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The grammar and the texts composing the present book are products of the fieldwork I undertook in the Mukriyan region of Iranian Kurdistan within the frame of my doctoral research between 2009 and 2013. Many people and organizations contributed to the completion of that research. I would first like to express my gratitude to the native speakers from Mahabad and Şino (Oshnaviyeh) towns of Iranian Kurdistan, who hosted me, befriended me, and provided me with extensive data. My heartfelt thanks to my hosts and informants Salah Payanyani and Mihemmed Ehmediazer, together with their families, who helped me with unfailing patience in all respects of a relatively long period of fieldwork. When I set out to Mukriyan, I was thinking that I would be doing a service to the study of the oral literature of the region, in addition to documenting its dialect, yet I found that many talented researchers who were native to that culture had already conducted extensive high quality work on oral literature. I was fortunate enough to become friends with many of them and to profit from their rich knowledge of the local oral traditions. Many of those friends in Mahabad, Nexede, and Şino might prefer to remain anonymous, but I would like to mention at least their first names, as an effort to acknowledge their support and friendship: Kak (Mr.) Rehber, Mam (Uncle) Qadir, Mam Osman, Kak Mustefa, Kak Ehmed, Kak Suleyman, Kak Rehman, Kak Mustefa, Kak Suad, Kak Sakar, Kak Mensur, Kak Nasir, Kak Suware, Kak Ibrahim. This book is dedicated to the people of Mukriyan and to those self-trained researchers and intellectuals from Mukriyan, who have selflessly engaged in researching and preserving the regional culture.
I would also like to express my gratitude to my two PhD supervisors, Professor François Jacquesson and Professor Geoffrey Haig. I benefited extensively from their meticulous guidance and intellectual support. I believe that they will be pleased to see this grammar and text collection appear, as it foregrounds the speech community and is also accessible to the community members. In the jury at my PhD defense, my supervisors were accompanied by additional members to whom I would also like to extend my gratitude: Claude Hagêge, Agnes Kom, Annie Montaut, Pollet Samvelian, and Frank Seifart.
I received financial support for my doctoral research from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through the intermediary of the Kurdish Institute of Paris. I am grateful to both of these institutions for having provided me with this opportunity. I would like to express my gratitude to my research institution, Langues et Civilisations a Tradition Orale (LACITO) of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). LACITO provided me with an office and logistic support during my studies, while it was also thanks to the generous grants from LACITO that I was able to conduct fieldwork during three trips to Iranian Kurdistan. I am also grateful for the support I received from my two universities, the Doctoral School 268 of Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 in France and the Fakultät Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften of the Otto-Friedrich-Universitat Bamberg in Germany.
I would like to thank all of my colleagues and friends from LACITO and the University of Bamberg, from whom I learned a lot while also enjoying a shared working space. For their help with various technical matters, I would like to thank Jean-Michel Roynard (LACITO), Christian Chanard (LLACAN), and Jêröme Picard (CNRS de Villejuif).
In the preparation of this volume, Denise Bailey shared her extensive expertise in text presentation and edited the English of the manuscript. Stevan Vanderwerf kindly helped me with the technical work in preparing the lexicon in LexiquePro. I am deeply grateful for their unconditional expert assistance. Finally, I am thankful to Prof. Nicholas Sims-Williams for accepting this work to be published in the series Beitrage zur Iranistik and for his various comments and corrections to the manuscript.
Chapter 1
Background to the Language, Community, And Fieldwork
1.1 Introduction
The present work is a grammatical description of the Mukri variety of Central Kurdish accompanied by a ’collection of texts and a brief lexicon. More theoretical aspects of person marking and argument indexation patterns in Central Kurdish are presented in a companion volume currently being prepared for publication (Öpengin forthc.) Central Kurdish, more widely known as Sorani, is one of the major varieties of Kurdish, itself a branch of Western Iranian languages (cf Kom 2003) Central Kurdish is spoken in Iraq and Iran by the majority of the Kurdish population in these two countries McCarus (2009:587) estimates the number of its speakers as around 5 million, while in Lewis, Simons & Fennig (2013) the number is more specifically stated as 6,750,000. This background chapter presents the language and the speech community under study (§1.2); the position of the variety within Kurdish dialectology (§1.3); a synopsis of previous work (§1.4); a description of the fieldwork and data collection process (§1.5), and a presentation of the corpus of this study (§1.6).
1.2 Mukri Central Kurdish and its speech community
Mukri (more precisely Mukï) or Mukriyani is the indigenous name for the variety of Central Kurdish spoken in the northern half of the Central Kurdish speech area in Iran. Figure 1 shows the speech zone of Mukri within (Central) Kurdish and with respect to its contact languages. Mahabad (also called Sablax1), the historical and current sociopolitical center of the region, is the principal city of the dialect area. Other important towns in the speech zone of Mukri are Bokan, Sardasht (Kr. Serdeşt), Piranshahr (Kr. Pîranşehr and Xanê), Naqadeh (Kr. Nexede), Shino or Oshnaviyeh (Kr. Şino), and Miandoab. The only extant statistics Lewis et al (2013) put the number of Central Kurdish speakers in Iran as 3,250,000, approximately one third of which (i.e. more than one million) could be considered as speakers of Mukri. However, both of the estimates are meant to be provisional and should thus be treated with due caution.
The term “Mukri” is obtained from the name of the principality of Mukriyan, which ruled in the region from the late fourteenth to the late nineteenth century.2 The names “Mukri” and “Mukriyani” denote provenance from the region, in addition to referring to the variety of Central Kurdish spoken there. We will refer to it as “Mukri” or “Mukri Kurdish”.
…..
1 This name comes from the name of the river Sauj-boulagh (or Sauj-bulaq), originally a Turkie name, which was replaced by Mahabad during the nationalist Pahlavi regime (Minorsky 1957:65), more precisely, in 1935 (Vali 2011:26).
2 See Hassanpour (1989), but also Oberling (2010) and Minorsky (1957:73-74).
Ergin Öpengin
The Mukri Variety of Central Kurdish
Ludwig Reichert
Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag
The Mukri Variety of Central Kurdish
Grammar, Texts, and Lexicon
Beiträge zur iranistik
Georges Redard, herausgegeben von Nicholas Sims-Williams
Band 40
Wiesbaden 2016
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© 2016 Dr / Ludwig Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden
ISBN: 978-3-95490-132-6
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