Peter Lerch's Zaza-Related Sections

Preface

I have only a few words to put before this section. What is necessary to know when using the glossaries communicated here has been said in the introduction, in which at the same time I have endeavored to give a compressed history of the study of the Kurdish language in Europe.

The comparison attempted by me of Kurdish words with those of other Iranian languages was initially not intended for print. I had originally undertaken it for myself for the purpose of gaining, by means of it, a more exact insight into the sound relationships of the individual Kurdish language varieties and dialects known to me. Although I am far from having indicated all comparisons of Kurdish words within the Iranian languages that are already possible, I nevertheless resolved to make this material generally accessible, since in any case I must refer to it often in the phonology.

Zaza, Hedrüs, and the Limits of Classification

I have already spoken in my travel report about the distribution of Zaza.

It remains for me still to report that I also possess a small sample of the dialect spoken in Hedrüs, a village between Temišgezék and Gumîš-Madén.¹ I recorded this sample in Roslavl, according to the words of a Kurd named Mustafä, who was born in the named village. It forms the beginning of a tale. Let the text and translation be communicated here:²

The reader will have noticed that Mustafä is not very skillful in narration and that his dialect should be counted as belonging to Kurmanji. I earlier expressed the supposition (see Part I, Report p. xxi) that the Kurdish language divides into five branches, namely Zaza, Kurmanji, Kelhüri, Guräni, and Lüri. The Kurdish texts and word collections that have become accessible to me up to now belong for the most part to Zaza and Kurmanji. Only after the following investigation of the vocabulary, as well as of the phonetic and grammatical peculiarities of the Kurdish language samples before us, will it be possible to determine whether the dialects of Suleimania (in Chodzko) and Sina (translation of the Gulistan) should both be counted as Kurmanji. The language of the Lurs, of which we have no sufficient samples, must for the present still remain a riddle to us.³

Arrangement of the Glossary

The glossary has first of all been worked out with regard to the texts published by me, and I therefore include in it words that:

1. occur in the texts published in the first section of this work;
2. include all those words that I otherwise recorded in Roslavl; to these also belong those that I encountered only in the folk songs.

The glossary falls into two sections: one for Kurmanji, the other for Zaza.

In the first section I also cite, with the individual words, the forms of those words as they appear in the Kurdish word collections published up to now and in the other materials discussed by me above. Then follow the comparisons with individual Iranian languages. In an appendix to the first section of the glossary, the list of words is given that are found in the sample from the dialect in Hedrüs and in the translation from the Gulistan. In the glossary of Zaza, in order to avoid repetitions, reference will often be made to the first section. At the close an index is to be given.⁴

Selected Addenda

In Zaza we have the postposition ver.

In gö'en, gö'in = New Persian xun, we see that one need not explain the latter from Old Bactrian/Avestan vöhuna as if the first syllable had fallen away; rather, we see that here the not infrequent transition of v into a guttural has taken place. We have just had an example of this transition in gile. Zaza gö'en, gö'in and New Persian xun are mediated by the Kurmanji forms xo'in and xu'in.⁵