Magin_Edward-thesis

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the only Northern Kurdish term that is appropriate for the poem is zêmar. Zêmar means
‘mourning’ or ‘sorrow’ (Chyet 2003:689) and perhaps best describes the poem, as the
sense of sadness and loss is strongly evident throughout the poem. Sindî describes zêmar
as:
…a sort of crying―when you are alone and loose something, some
valuable thing, especially when you lose one of your relatives or
somebody close to you…This sort of crying or sadness we call zêmar
which is different from the word girîan. The word girîan means ‘crying.’
This is near to the English word―girîan and ‘crying.’ But girîan is the
crying when everywhere you can cry, like outside the home or at home.
People can hear you when you cry…But zêmar is when you cry in your
loneliness, and you are alone and you cry for some personal thing. (Sindî
2010)
Hence, zêmar is closer to the term keening, which Turco defines as ‘mournful wailing’
(Turco 2000:79). Eulogy would be an additional theme that can be presented within
zêmar poetry.
3.5 Sindî on the use of other Northern Kurdish subdialects
Regarding how the variations in spoken Northern Kurdish are helpful to the poet,
Sindî (2010) had the following to say:
The people in Zaxo [where Sindî is from] speak differently from the
people in Amedy and Akre and Dohuk. Sometimes the people in Amedy
omit one letter, one sound, when they speak, while in Zaxo they
pronounce the whole word. So our poets here or in Sulemaniya or in
Hawler (the Kurdish name for Erbil) get an advantage from these
differences between the subdialects.
As an example, Sindî mentioned the line, çend car tu hatî, which means, ‘how many
times did you come.’ In Zaksho the word for ‘time’ in this phrase is car. In Amedy they
say ca, leaving off the r. If the poet preferred ca over car for the poem, he or she could
use it. Word variations can be especially useful if two versions differ in number of
syllables. Also, as end rhyme is one of the most important features of Neo-classical
poetry, a word different from the poet’s subdialect may also be useful in forming a rhyme
at the end of a line, or elsewhere in a poem.