62
Dehqan and Mengozzi
and Neo-Aramaic poetry. For the lament on the death of his son,
David had a model in an analogous poem by Khamis bar
Qardaḥe.
22
The autograph collection of his poems was once kept in the
library of the Dominican Monastery of Mar Yaqo, near Dehok, and
is now part of the collection of Syriac manuscripts of the Domini-
cans of Mosul.
23
According to the description annotated in pencil
by Father Rhétoré on the last pages of the manuscript, it contains
nineteen poems written in Classical Syriac, four poems in Neo-
Aramaic and two poems in Kurdish: the Lament published here and
a poem On the Love of this World and of Money, and the Imminent Coming
of the Antichrist.
K
URDISH IN
E
AST
S
YRIAC SCRIPT
It seems unlikely that David of Barazne had models for Kurdish
Garshuni at his disposal. He probably invented the quite sophisti-
cated system he used to transcribe Kurdish sounds (phonemes, but
in certain cases allophones or phones too) in Syriac script, combin-
ing Classical Syriac conventions with special conventions and dia-
critics which were already in use for other phonological systems,
namely Arabic, Neo-Aramaic and perhaps Persian.
Certain Syriac letters correspond to more than one Kurdish
phoneme:
gāmal with a tilde below
/ç’/ unvoiced aspirated [t
ʃ
h
]
/ç/ unvoiced
/c/ voiced [d
ӡ
]
wāw
24
/v/
/w/
kāp
/k/
22
A. Mengozzi, “The Book of Khamis bar Qardaḥe: History of the
Text, Genres and Research Perspectives,” in
Syriac Encounters, proceedings
of the Sixth North American Syriac Symposium (Duke University, Durham,
North Carolina, June 26-29, 2011), forthcoming.
23
Ms. 82 in B. Sony, Le catalogue des manuscrits du couvent des Dominicains
de Mossoul (Mosul, 1997).
24
[v] supposedly existed as the fricative allophone of /b/ in Classical
Syriac,
but it does not occur in the Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects of
northern Iraq, where <ḇ> is usually pronounced [w].
A Kurdish Garshuni Poem
63
/k’/ [k
h
]
pē
/p/
/p’/ [p
h
]
rēš
/r/
/ŗ/
tāw
/t/
/t’/ [t
h
]
There is no special sign for the series of Badinānī aspirated
consonants, written , ,
and <ç’> in modern
Kurmanji orthography,
25
and for the trill <ŗ>. The gāmal with a til-
de (
̰ܓ
) which is used for Arabic Garshuni
ǧ
and Neo-Aramaic
ǧ
or č
serves, as in Neo-Aramaic, for both the voiced and unvoiced pala-
tal affricates of Kurdish. It is not clear whether the gāmal with tilde
in the word dêjît (17a, 18b) represents a dialectal affricate pronunci-
ation dêcît or whether its use there is extended to the fricative /j/
([ӡ], here usually written <š> with diacritics:
݅ܫ
).
25
Given the phonemic status of aspiration in the Amadiya and
Zakho dialects, MacKenzie proposes the aspirated voiceless plosives
should be written <
ṕ
, t́, ḱ>: D.N. MacKenzie, Kurdish Dialect Studies I,
London Oriental Series vol. 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961),
40. Thackstone leaves the aspirated consonants unmarked and suggests
underlining the non-aspirated series, described as “accompanied by slight
pharyngealization”: W. M. Thackston, Kurmanji Kurdish. A Reference Gram-
mar with Selected Readings, 2006 [www.fas.harvard.edu/~iranian/ Kurman-
ji/kurmanji_1_grammar.pdf; last visit November 2013], 4. On the nota-
tion of these sounds in current Kurdish orthographies, Chyet observes
that “the aspirated/non-aspirated consonantal pairs (p’-p/t’-t/k’-k/ç’-ç)
are regularly distinguished by the Soviet scholars and in a few works by
modern linguists. The Soviet scholars, many of whom also know Armeni-
an, have no doubt been influenced by the existence of this feature in Ar-
menian as well. This distinction is generally ignored in modern Kurdish
publications... In the Arabic script, no way has been devised to distinguish
these consonantal pairs. Nevertheless, for my informants from Iraqi Kur-
distan – who are most comfortable using the Arabic script – the distinc-
tion is real, and has a phonemic importance”: M.L. Chyet, “Kurmanji
Kurdish Lexicography: A Survey and Discussion,” web site of the Kurd-
ish Academy of Language, 1997 [www.kurdishacademy.org/?q=fa/node/
142; last visit November 2013]. Thus, the Garshuni system invented by
David is in line with Iraqi Kurdish as written today in the Arabic script.