66
Dehqan and Mengozzi
rwāḥā
/u/
/o/
The ālap which almost regularly follows a zqāpā or a zlāmā qašyā
to write /a/ – as for Arabic long
ā – or /ê/ is often marked with a
linea occultans, that is the Classical Syriac conventional sign for con-
sonants which are written as in historical spelling but not actually
pronounced. It is used here as a rather pedantic way to indicate
when ālap is a mater lectionis. This ālap with linea occultans is found
elsewhere in late East-Syriac manuscripts for long vowels in foreign
words,
28
but it does not occur in the Kurdish Garshuni texts de-
scribed by Pennacchietti, Kreyenbroek and Harrak. Zqāpā with ālap
– without linea occultans – occasionally occurs to mark a long ā in
Neo-Aramaic words of Arabic origin, as a Garshuni spelling: e.g.,
ܡ"#ܬ
‘perfect’.
29
Inconsistencies in writing the Kurdish vowels with the Syriac
punctuation system can probably be explained with reference to
the phonologic status of vowels in Neo-Aramaic. In most Iraqi
Neo-Aramaic dialects, vowel length is not phonemic, since short
and long vowels are allophones and occur in complementary distri-
bution: long vowels in open syllables and corresponding short
vowels in closed syllables. This is probably why Kurdish /e/ is
usually written with pthāḥā, but it is written with zqāpā in a couple
of cases: e.g., gunehêd 3c or xerib 8a. The phonological status of /o/
and /u/ is uncertain in a number of Neo-Aramaic dialects, which
probably explains the fact that Kurdish /u/ is written with rḇāṣā or
rwāḥā.
Short central /i/ ([ɪ] or [ɨ]) is either left unmarked or written
with
zlāmā pšiqā. Once it is written
pthāḥā, when it immediately pre-
cedes a pharyngeal ḥ: bêsiḥeta (1b). When it is not written, probably
it does not count as a syllable for metrical purposes. Its frequent
elision – faithfully reflected in the script – is crucial in preserving
the rigid isosyllabic structure of the verse lines. Each verse has four
rhyming lines and most lines have ten vowels, i.e. ten syllables or
ten syllabic feet. Nine- or eleven-syllable lines do occur. Rhyme
pattern and syllabic structure are those of late Syriac and Neo-
28
E.g., the court camp of the Mongols Ala Dagh, preceded by the
preposition
b-, is spelt
! ܵ# ܵ$݇&ܵ'
in the ms. Mingana 149 (dated 1893), 155b.
29
A. Mengozzi, A Story in a Truthful Language, CSCO 589, 318.
A Kurdish Garshuni Poem
67
Aramaic poetry, which is confirmed by the fact that the text can be
sung to the tune of a Classical Syriac melody, as it says in the ru-
bric. An imperfect rhyme occurs in 3d (-şin -şim), but the end
rhymes that group the four lines of each verse are usually regular
and are responsible for grammatically unacceptable vowel changes
(poetic license). E.g., fera (9a) respects the rhyme of the verse,
where one would expect the correct form fere, and rhyming îmanî
(16c) should in fact be îmanê.
In Garshuni, typically Arabic orthographic conventions such as
tāʾ
marbūṭa, unassimilated
lām of the definite article before solar
consonants, ālap for long ā, sometimes also alif waṣla and even alif
maqṣūra (written with final
yuḏ) are often adopted in Syriac script,
which led Briquel-Chatonnet to speak of Garshuni as a Syriac writ-
ing system ‘pensé en arabe’.
30
On the contrary, David of Barazne
appears to be making an attempt to write a dialectal variety of
Kurdish that has no spelling conventions of its own. He feels free
to follow typically Syriac orthographic conventions: the Kurdish
conjunction û is regularly written as the non-syllabic proclitic
equivalent w- of Classical Syriac;
31
plural nouns are marked with sey-
āmē; the enclitic morpheme –
d in the Kurdish endings –
êd is written
as the proclitic Aramaic subordinator (-ē d-);
32
yuḏ with a superscript
30
F. Briquel Chatonnet, “De l’intérêt de l’étude du garshouni et des
manuscrits écrits selon ce système,” in
L’Orient chrétien dans l’empire musul-
man. Hommage au Professeur Gérard Troupeau, Studia arabica 3, ed. G.
Gobillot and M.T. Urvoy (Paris: Éditions de Paris, 2005), 466. Kiraz clas-
sifies Arabic Garshuni – “Syro-Arabic” in his terminology – as a translit-
eration system, i.e. “a direct mapping of one writing system into another
at the grapheme (not graph) level”, and Kurdish Garshuni – “Syro-
Kurdish” – as a transcription scheme, i.e. “the mapping of the sounds of
one language into the graphemes of anther at the phoneme level” (G. A.
Kiraz, Tūrrāṣ Mamllā, 292).
31
This spelling, which conforms with Classical Syriac orthography,
possibly reflects a dialectal or an allegro pronunciation of the conjunction
û as a short
u or as a consonantal
w-. Accordingly, the conjunction would
not seem to count as a syllable/foot for metrical purposes. In the poem
published by Kreyenbroek, “The Lawij of Mor Basilios Shimʽun”, the
Kurdish conjunction û is written as an underlined prefixed w- (G. A.
Kiraz, Tūrrāṣ Mamllā, 308).
32
The same phenomenon (proclitic d- written according to Classical
Syriac orthography for enclitic –d as it is actually pronounced) is found in