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INTRODUCTION
Si. All the Jews of Zakho, together with all the Jews of Iraq, emigrated to Israel in the years 1951 and 1952. Some waves of Kurdish Jews had already arrived in Palestine in the 1920s.2 In Israel, their Neo-Aramaic speech became strongly influenced and gradually superseded by Israeli Hebrew.3 The Neo-Aramaic speech of the elders, however, was much less influenced by Modern Hebrew and still retains characteristic Kurdistani features, including a large number of loanwords from Kurdish-Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and old, traditional I Hebrew.4 Another typical feature is the coloring of their Neo-Aramaic speech with numerous proverbs in the languages of their neighboring ethnic groups. The multilingual proverbs are an excellent example of the mutual influence of the various ethnic groups and cultures of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Author's Note. The transcription used here is almost identical with that used by II. J. Polotsky for the dialect of Zakho in Franz Rosenthal, ed., An Aramaic Handbook (Wiesbaden, 1967).
The proverbs are arranged alphabetically according to the phonetic transcription. For subject and language classification, see indexes after the proverbs.
Non Neo-Aramaic proverbs are identified following the transcription. K., Kurdish; Ar., Arabic.
The translation is as literal as possible; the word order has not always been preserved. A more literal translation, if necessary, is added between < >. Words in parentheses ( ) in the translation clarify the text.
In parallel references, the number following the author's name refers to the proverb number, unless otherwise indicated.
In the notes and proverbs references are cited by last name of author; dates are supplied only for authors with more than one publication listed.
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1 Presented as a paper at the annual meeting of the Western Branch of the American Oriental Society, Stanford University, 23 March 1975. Proverbs may be analyzed in various ways, e.g., by their origin, structure, content, social message, or the concrete context of a specific proverb. For a discussion and bibliography on these aspects see Dundes. This paper is a comparative presentation of multilingual proverbs of a small Jewish community, with necessary comments on their general linguistic-ethnic context. Any further elaboration is not considered.
2 For more historical details see Ben-Jacob, pp. 58-62.
3 See details in Sabar (19756).
4 See Sabar (1974b).
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