Magin_Edward-thesis

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some similarities to the system that was adopted in 1926 for writing Turkish. Instead of
using the Wahby system, which was closer to English spellings in that it used digraphs
ch, sh, gh, iy, rh, lh and uw, it used the graphemes ç, ş, ẍ, î, ř, ĺ, and û (Hassanpour
1992:374). In Iraq and Iran, an adapted Arabic script, herein referred to as Kurdish
script, is the primary orthography, though in Iraq some books and magazines are written
in the Latin alphabet. An adapted Cyrillic alphabet has been used by Kurds in Russia,
Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan since the 1930’s (Thackston 2006:viii). For the
purposes of this study, I have used the Latin script for all poems. All interlinear glossing
follows the conventions of the Leipzig Glossing Rules. 32 All examples that are not
otherwise referenced come from my own research. Their translations have been
confirmed with native speakers of the language.
4.2.1 Vowels
Vowels in Northern Kurdish are written as a, e, ê, i, î, o, u and û. Pronunciation
varies across the area where Northern Kurdish is spoken. Some words are written
differently due to dialect differences. The sounds herein described are for the area of
focus in this study.
The following is a list of the Latin letters for Northern Kurdish, with International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) equivalents (in brackets). I have also included examples from
English and example words for each sound.
32 One website where these rules may be viewed is http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossingrules.php.
A pdf document is also available at this website.