a-practical-kurdish-grammar

KURDISH ORTHOGRAPHY 227
There are a great many short 'love poems' and 'songs of
triumph' memorized by the singers and poets of the various
tribes ; but few of these exist in written form, and they vary
in words and pronunciations peculiar to the individual tribe.'
The written poems, legends and stories, on the other hand,
are so full of words unnecessarily borrowed from the neigh¬
boring tongues, like Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and even Syriac,
that one hardly knows which language is represented the most.
This, of course, is not the fault of the language, but the fauU
of the Kurdish writer.
It has not yet become a custom to do much writing in
Kurdish, and therefore, a great many of the purer Kurdish
words and expressions, as well as the Kurdified foreign words,
are looked upon as more or less unclassical and vulgar. The
Kurdish writers, aware of this, try to evade criticism by em¬
ploying many foreign words instead, or by using the original
orthography of a word rather than the one peculiarly Kurdish.
Where this fear of ridicule is absent, another motive or
reason for employing unnecessary foreign words and ortho¬
graphy, is often a desire to display one's knowledge of Arabic,
Turkish, or Persian, or on account of insufficient knowledge
of 'real Kurdish'.
In Kurdish writings a word is often met with spelt in two
or three different ways, the same as is often the case in
Turkish, Syriac, and even Persian. And this is done by writers
of equal ability and repute. Example : Some will invariably
write C-frt' (sa'at) 'hour' (Ar.), instead of giving it the