Read Languages In the World Online
Authors: Julie Tetel Andresen,Phillip M. Carter
Languages In the World (16 page)
So, where does all of this leave the Kurds, who were left off the map at the end of World War I? Today, Kurdistan refers to a geocultural region where ethnic Kurds form a numerical majority of the population, speak Kurdish, and share a cultural heritage. This region includes portions of Syria, eastern Turkey, and northern Iraq. In Syria,
after decades of oppression of the Kurdish language, things seem to be letting up. As President Bashar Assad's government loses ground in Kurdish areas, the Kurdish language is being taught there for the first time in years. The Kurds in Turkey have also seen gains. In 1928, a law was passed officially banning the letters X, W, and Q, which do not exist in the Turkish alphabet but which are common in Kurdish names. As recently as 2005, Kurds in Turkey were fined for displaying signs at a New Year's Eve festival containing the letters Q and W. Finally, in 2013, the letter-ban law was overturned, and it is now possible for the Kurds in Turkey to spell Kurdish without the fear of legal retribution.
It is in Iraq â the country from which the Kurds were forced to flee on foot in 1990 â where the Kurds have made the greatest political gains. In Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous region governed by the Kurds in Northern Iraq, the people are now able to talk about the issues they would have debated had Kurdistan made it onto the map sometimes in the 1920s. That is, they are now engaged in addressing the question about the official language: Should it be a variety known as Sorani, written in the Perso-Arabic script and spoken by some five million Kurds, or Kurmanji, written with the Latin alphabet and spoken on both sides of the IraqiâTurkish border by about one million Kurds? The issue of the Kurdish language has also fared well on the national stage. The ratification of the Iraqi Constitution in 2005 made Kurdish a co-official language of the nation, alongside Arabic. In 2014, an amendment calling for the use of Kurdish in official government correspondence, national passports, and Iraqi currency was passed in the Iraqi National Assembly. In the same amendment, Turkmen, Syriac, and Asuri languages were also recognized as co-official languages, although they do not have the full status of Arabic and Kurdish.
The politics of the region change as quickly as the sands blow in the deserts of Western Iraq. In 2014, large swaths of Iraq and Syria fell under control of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (aka ISIS). Aside from stirring tensions in an already-fragile region, the fact that ISIS is not invested in a unified Iraq means that the country is closer to disintegration than ever. At the same time, Turkey, who long sought to block an independent Kurdistan, seems to have softened on the idea of an independent Kurdish state. This is likely due to the ever-present and increasingly important dynamic of global economics: over 1000 Turkish companies operate in Iraqi Kurdistan, while Iraqi Kurds operate a new oil pipeline that terminates in Turkey. Though the future of the Kurds in Iraq and elsewhere remains uncertain, it appears that a sovereign Kurdistan is more of a possibility than at any time since the end of World War I.
[Kurdish (Indo-European)]Kurdish belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Speakers of Kurdish, who number approximately 30 million, are primarily dispersed
across four modern nations: Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Approximately seven million Kurds live in Iran, where they are the largest ethnic minority group. In Iraq, about four million Kurds â a majority in that country â live in the autonomous northern region known as Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurdish cultural capital of Iraqi Kurdistan is the contested city of Kirkuk, which at the time of the writing of this book had just come under the political control of the Kurds. Outside of the autonomous region, Kurdish speakers can also be found in Iraq's other major cities, including some 300,000 in Baghdad and some 50,000 in Mosul. In Syria, Kurds comprise about 9% of the population and are again the largest ethnic group. The Kurdish presence is numerically largest in Turkey, where approximately 50% of the overall Kurdish population live and where Kurds make up 15â20% of the Turkish population. The heavily Kurdish southeastern region of Turkey is unofficially known as Turkish Kurdistan.
The two main varieties of Kurdish are Kurmanji, spoken predominantly in Turkish Kurdistan, and Sorani, spoken further to the south in Iran and Iraq. Not only are these dialects the basis for the two main literary traditions in Kurdish, but also they are written in different scripts, Kurmanji in the Roman alphabet, Sorani in the Perso-Arabic script. These varieties are for the most part mutually intelligible, though they demonstrate a number of grammatical differences. First, the Kurdish varieties spoken in the north of the region mark nouns for gender, while the dialects in the south do not. In contrast, the varieties spoken in the south mark subjects for plural number and use definite articles, while the varieties in the north do not. The most striking difference between northern and southern varieties of Kurdish, however, has to do with the arrangement and grammatical marking of syntactic elements in a sentence. Southern varieties are characterized by accusative alignment, while northern varieties are characterized by ergative alignment. We describe ergativity in the following section on structural characteristics.
The grammar of most Indo-European languages contrasts grammatical subjects with grammatical objects. If the language has morphological case, subjects appear in the unmarked nominative case, and objects appear in the morphologically marked accusative case. Thus, the word for âdog' in Polish takes the unmarked form
pies
if it is a subject and
psa
if it is an object.
Pies
is the form found in the dictionary and will always be the form of the subject, no matter if the verb is transitive, that is, it takes an object, or intransitive, that is, it takes no object. This configuration of subjects and objects characterizes accusative alignment systems.
The grammar of the northern varieties of Kurdish is characterized by a different configuration in which the object of a transitive verb â âthe ball' in âthe girl threw
the ball
' â is grouped with the subject of an intransitive verb â âthe boy' in â
the boy
slept' â and appears as unmarked in the nominative case (NOM, below). This is contrasted with the subject of a transitive verb (âthe girl' in â
the girl
threw the ball'), which is marked in the oblique case (OBL, below). This configuration is known as an ergative alignment system, and is widespread in languages of the Himalayas, the Caucasus, Australia, and beyond. Within the Indo-European language family, all of the languages
demonstrating ergativity, including Kurdish, are in the Indo-Iranian branch. The following examples (Karimi 2012) illustrate the way ergativity works in the northern varieties of Kurdish.
| (1) | tu | be | pilîkaÌn cÌuy-î |
| you.NOM | with stairs | went-2.SG | |
| âYou went down the stairs.' | |||
| (2) | min | tu | dît-î |
| I.OBL | you.NOM | saw-2.SG | |
| âI saw you.' | |||
| (3) | te | ez | dît-im |
| you.OBL | I.NOM | saw-1.SG | |
| âYou saw me.' |
In the first example, the subject of the intransitive verb
tu
appears in the nominative. This is the same case used to inflect the objects of the transitive verb in examples (2) and (3). Note that we see the same form
tu
when âyou' is used as the subject of the intransitive verb in (1) and the object of the transitive verb in (2). In contrast, âyou' is marked in the oblique case as
te
when it is the subject of the transitive sentence, as shown in (3). Speakers of languages such as English are generally not aware of the differences between verbs such as âto sleep' (intransitive) and âto throw' (transitive) unless they take a course in grammar. Because of the ergative nature of Kurdish grammar, speakers must be aware of differences in transitivity.
We have already seen that verbs can be inflected for grammatical categories such as person, number, tense, and aspect. Inflectional endings can also be used to allow speakers to take particular stances toward the ideas they express. This grammatical stance-taking is known as mood, and it may be expressed with or without special morphology. English speakers sometimes give advice using a construction that begins with the subordinate clause “If I were you,” as in “If I were you, I would exercise more.” When they do this, they take a hypothetical stance on their utterance, and they use the subjunctive mood to do so. Subjunctive is one of several moods known together as
irrealis
, which indicate that the expressed action may not have happened or may be incorrect. Irrealis moods are also used to express doubt, fear, hope, and other emotions.
Mood is characteristic of the Indo-European languages, in which up to four mood distinctions can be made. Some languages in the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic family make more than 10 mood distinctions. In modern Kurdish, three mood distinctions are made, and unlike in modern English, unique morphological prefixes and suffixes are used on verbs to distinguish among them. The
indicative
mood indicates that an utterance is taken to be true, the
imperative
mood indicates a command, and the
subjunctive
, as we have seen, indicates that an utterance is hypotherical or as yet unrealized.
The indicative is the default, unmarked mood in Kurdish, which means that no special morphology is needed. To form the subjuctive in the present tense, the prefix
bÃ
is attached to a conjugated verb. For example, the verb
chuÌn
âto go' appears as follows in the subjunctive:
bÃchim
âI (may) go,'
bÃchi
âyou (may) go,' and so on. If the utterance is negative rather than affirmative,
bÃ
is replaced by the negative subjunctive prefix
ná,
as in
náchim
,
nachi
, and so on. The present subjunctive is used in the following types of constructions (Thackston 2006):
| (1) Deliberatives | |
| DargaÌ b  kaynawa? | âShould we open the door?' |
| (2) Cohortatives | |
| BaÌ b  royn | âCome on, let's go!' |
| (3) Complement to verbs of wanting | |
| Amawe b  chimaÌ maÌÅe | âI want to go home' |
As we have said before, all grammars leak (Sapir 1921), and in Kurdish, the subjunctive morphology is used with certain conjuctions such as
bar l' awaî
âbefore' and
ba be awaî
âwithout,' which do not necessarily express subjunctive mood.
In Chapter 3, we saw that in Romanian, pronouns may attach to inflected verbs in constructions such as
am vÄzut-
o
pe Maria
, âI saw/have seen-her Mary.' Linguists call this type of construction a clitic, a structure that resembles a bound morpheme but has word-like characteristics and is phonologically dependent on the word to which it attaches. Clitics can attach to different parts of the host word and are named accordingly. Thus,
proclitics
attach to the beginning of the word,
mesoclitics
between the stem and another affix, and
enclitics
at the end of the word. In the French expression
je t'aime
(âI love you'), the object pronoun
te
attaches as a proclitic to a conjugated form of the verb
aimer
.
Kurdish allows several types of enclitics, including possessive pronouns and other pronominal structures. In addition, speakers of Kurdish cliticize a special structure known as
îsh
, which serves an important discourse function of expressing agreement and generally means âtoo,' âalso,' or âeven.' It can attach to single nouns or pronouns, as well as to noun phrases containing an adjective. The following examples illustrate the way the enclitic functions grammatically (Thackston 2006):
| min I/me | mîn shI/me too |
If the word to which the enclitic attaches ends in a vowel, the initial vowel
î
is lost:
| ema we/us | ema' sh we/us too |
If the word to which the enclitic attaches already has an attached pronominal enclitic, the
îsh
enclitic attaches between the noun and the pronoun. The following examples illustrate how enclitics concatenate in Kurdish:
| baÌwkî his father | baÌwk îsh î his father too |
| paÌrakaÌyaÌn their money | paÌrakaÌ' sh yaÌn their money too |
| rafîqakaÌnim my friends | rafîqakaÌn îsh im even my friends |