Dabbling diary: Iranian interests (Kurdish, Persian, etc.)
As I’ve tried to stick to a regular schedule for my blog posts over the years, one problem has come up again and again: my language learning interests come and go faster than my planning can keep up.
That’s particularly true for languages that I’ve put in the “dabbling” bucket — ones that I pick up for a little while, mostly just to get a feel for how they work, with no intention of getting good at them, ready to drop whenever something with more novelty comes along.
Case in point: at the end of my last post of 2021, I laid out a schedule for my next three articles: Aramaic/Syriac, Kurdish, and Armenian — three languages I was particularly interested in at the time. But by the time I hit “publish” on my Aramaic post three weeks ago, I was already ready to take a break from that language….
Now it’s time for Kurdish, and well, it’s already been two weeks since I last looked at a Kurdish textbook. 😅 (Mainly because I’m pivoting more heavily towards Armenian, so at least the next post in this series should be good. 🤞)
But even though my latest fling with Kurdish only lasted two months, I definitely came out of the process with a stronger grasp of the language, and I still have some takeaways I figure would be worth writing down. While I’m at it, I’ll also take a look at some of the other languages in the Iranian language family, starting with the most well-known of all:
Persian (a.k.a. Farsi. or Dari. or Tajik)
As I noted in the first post of my Turkic languages series three years ago, there is just one other language besides Russian which I have studied in a classroom setting to date: Uzbek.
Compared to the outcome of my Russian studies, I’d say that my efforts to learn Uzbek were a lot less successful. Although I can understand most of what is being said in an Uzbek-language news broadcast, for example, my ability to produce speech in the language myself is quite limited (the same is true of its close relative, Uyghur). But that one year of Uzbek class did have other benefits too: a solid introduction to Persian vocabulary.
I had tried learning a bit of Persian previously as well, but studying Uzbek (and Uyghur, and Tatar and Bashkir during the one summer I spent in Russia) gave me a greater appreciation of how influential Persian had been in the broader region. I started studying Persian again the following summer (2011), but with a twist: instead of jumping right into Iranian Persian (a.k.a. Farsi), I started with the Tajik dialect instead, mainly using A Beginners’ Guide to Tajiki.
My main reason for deciding to do Tajik first was the spelling — whereas Iranian Farsi and Afghan Dari are written in Arabic script and don’t usually spell out short vowels, Tajik is written in Cyrillic so all the sounds are spelled out in full. Since I was going to be studying the language on my own, and with limited access to audio material, a fully phonetic spelling system would help flatten the learning curve a bit at first.
But Arabic-script Persian has its advantages too, like making the etymology of Arabic loanwords clearer, since many letters that are pronounced differently in Arabic have merged in Persian. About a year later, I started learning Iranian Farsi as well, which also entailed getting used to some of the peculiarities of the colloquial Iranian accent (for example long ān becomes ūn in many words, and some verb roots like shav- (to become) and guy- (to speak) usually become just sh- and g-).
Around the same time, though, I was getting started on my first major post-college language-learning project: learning Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani, which would take up much of my attention from 2013–2015. This meant I would have to stop learning Persian for a while… but also, not really.
Given the huge influence Persian has had on Hindustani, I was still learning new Persian words on a regular basis even while studying Hindi and Urdu. In fact, the pronunciation of Persian words preserved in Hindustani is arguably closer to the historical standard than the modern pronunciation used in Iran (e.g. long ē and ō have merged with ī and ū in Iranian Farsi, but are still distinct sounds in Hindi). And studying Urdu was also what forced me to finally learn to read the Nastaliq style of Arabic script, which is commonly used for Persian as well.
I ended up revisiting Persian again in 2017, while I was in journalism school. I was taking a class on refugee issues, and even got to use a bit of my refreshed language knowledge for a few stories I wrote about refugees from Afghanistan. I also went through a few textbooks specifically for the version of Persian spoken in Afghanistan (a.k.a. Dari).
After studying the language on and off for several years, I’d say Persian is one of the languages I have the hardest time assessing my “level” in. On the one hand, just in terms of grammatical structure and pronunciation, Persian is definitely one of the “simplest” languages in the Middle East to learn, and I’ve also been able to pick up a lot of Persian vocabulary while studying other languages, from Arabic to Uyghur. On the other hand, I’ve had relatively fewer opportunities to actually practice speaking the language, compared with Arabic, Hindustani, Turkish or Hebrew, and the availability of learning material (especially the type suitable for self-study) also feels a bit limited.
(On the occasions that I have spoken Persian with people from Iran or Afghanistan, I’ve gotten seemingly flattering feedback like “Are you from Tajikistan?” and “You sound like you could be from Afghanistan, but didn’t grow up there…”, which I don’t really know what to do with. Now that I’m living in Los Angeles, which is home to a larger Persian community than New York, it seems likely that I’ll be getting more practice — I’ve already had conversations in Persian at several language meetups here.)
In any case, one of the main reasons Persian is interesting to me (and is, in the long term, a language I’d like to reach at least B2 in) is the role that it played as a lingua franca across a broad swath of Eurasia from Turkey to India (or from Bosnia to Bengal, even). If you’re interested in this subject, I highly recommend the book The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca (available for free online!), which I read myself last year. In addition to the “core” Persian-influenced areas, the book also has a lot of interesting information on the use of Persian in places like Georgia, Dagestan, Siberia and China.
For an example, the following is a segment from the book that touches on the use of Persian in the China’s diplomatic correspondence with Central Asia and the Middle East. While the Ming dynasty bureaucracy had a specialized Persian translation department, things had changed by the time of the Qing:
The letters that places such as Afghanistan, Badakhshan, Bolor, Wakhan, Tibet, or Kashmir submit to the emperor or to the ambans (Manchu high officials) are all written in Persian, but among the mullahs and akhunds (a synonym for mullah), there are very few here who know this language. Since only the Akhund Shah ‘Abd al-Qadir knows Persian, whenever the begs [local governors] and heads of these various countries send a Persian letter, it is entrusted to him. He translates it into Muslim [hoise gisun, i.e., Turkic], and transmits this to a mullah who knows how to write in Muslim. The Muslims in the Seals Office then translate it into Mongolian and give it to the ambans, who translate it into Manchu. [page 180]
Another direction I’ve been meaning to advance my Persian studies is in the area of poetry. I got my hands on A Manual of Classical Persian Prosody last year, which also touches on Urdu and Turkic, although I only got halfway through the book before getting distracted by other things. I also have a Russian-Persian parallel edition of Rumi’s Masnavi on my computer that I might get to at some point.
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
The past two months weren’t the first time I’d attempted to learn Kurdish. For a few months before my trip to Istanbul in 2019, I had also included Kurdish in my language study rotation, although with a much lower priority than Turkish. I didn’t really have any occasions to speak Kurdish during my time in Turkey apart from a few phrases on my last day:
Anyway, after that trip I didn’t have much reason to continue studying Kurdish anymore (and I needed to focus on Japanese and Korean at the time), so I dropped it. On a few occasions in the past two years, I’ve come across bits of Kurdish dialog in various Turkish TV shows, or run into Kurdish speakers at language events, but didn’t really think about revisiting the language until last fall.
As I mentioned in my previous article about Aramaic, my interest in Kurdish happened to be re-ignited while I was dabbling in various Neo-Aramaic languages. Most of these languages were historically spoken by Christian and Jewish minorities in areas where the main Muslim ethnic group was Kurdish, so these languages all show some influence from Kurdish in not only vocabulary but also grammar. It also helped that I was already studying Armenian at the time, which is another language whose historical range overlaps extensively with Kurdish. So, I dug out my old Kurdish textbooks and scanned the internet for some new ones as well.
The first book I revisited was Kurmanji Kurdish: A Reference Grammar with Selected Readings, which is freely available online. I also reviewed Learn Kurdish: A Multi-level Course in Kurmanji, the main textbook I used the last time I tried to learn the language. The new books I found included Kurmanji Kurdish For The Beginners, Le Kurde Sans Peine, and Kurmanji Kurdish Reader.
Whereas Persian is arguably the simplest Iranian language in terms of grammar, Kurdish — particularly the most widespread variant, Kurmanji— is a bit more complicated. It has 1) two grammatical genders, 2) a distinction between direct and oblique cases for nouns, and 3) split ergativity, which altogether makes the grammar roughly as complicated as Hindustani.
Compared to my previous attempts at studying Kurdish, this time around I made sure to get the hang of common sound correspondences between Kurdish and Persian, to make it easier to retain new vocabulary. These include:
- Final “m” in Persian often corresponds with “v” in Kurdish, e.g. Kurdish silav (“hello”) comes from Persian/Arabic salām, Kurdish peyiv (“word”) is related to Persian payām (“message”),
- Persian “ā” often corresponds to Kurmanji “ê”, e.g. Persian darāz (“long”) vs. Kurdish dirêj, Persian rāh (“path”) vs Kurdish rê
- Persian “d” after a vowel often disappears in Kurdish, so verbs ending in -īdan in Persian generally correspond with Kurdish verbs ending in -în, khud (“self”) becomes xwe etc.
- Kurdish “j” (like French j, i.e. /ʒ/) is usually related to Persian “z”, e.g. Kurdish jin (“woman”) vs. Persian zan, or Kurdish jiyan (“life”) vs. Persian zindagī.
(For the last correspondence, the Kurdish sound interestingly also matches with related Slavic words like Russian žena and žizn’. The Kurdish word zanin also seems to correspond with Russian znat’ for example. I guess that’s how you might end up with wild theories like how Croatians are an ancient Iranian tribe. 🤪)
Another thing I managed to do this time around was find a wider range of Kurdish-language audio material to listen to. While in 2019 the only Kurdish audio I listened to was the Voice of America’s Kurdish broadcast, I’ve now found a number of different Youtube channels that put out a variety of content (news, talk shows, variety shows, documentaries, etc) in Kurmanji on a daily basis, from Iraqi Kurdistan, northern Syria, and Turkey (given the political situation, I was a bit surprised to learn that Turkey’s state-run broadcaster TRT has in fact had Kurdish programming since 2009).
So yeah, although I’m taking a break from Kurdish for the time being, I’ve built up a bigger collection of resources for next time around.
Sorani and other “dialects”
Kurmanji is the only form of Kurdish I’ve really studied in any depth at all, both because it’s the main variety spoken in Turkey and because it’s the most spoken overall. (And to some extent, also because it’s the form of Kurdish spoken in Syria, where Kurdish armed groups have made international headlines in recent years.)
The other main “dialect” of Kurdish is Sorani, which is spoken in Iraq and Iran (although there are Kurmanji speakers in those countries as well, as you can see in the map above). My limited knowledge of Sorani comes almost entirely from one book, Sorani Kurdish Reference Grammar (also free online).
The two most obvious differences between Sorani and Kurmanji are 1) that Sorani is mainly written in Arabic script, using a system that spells out all the vowels, similar to what modern Uyghur does, and 2) Sorani doesn’t have grammatical gender. While the lack of gender would seem to make Sorani a bit easier to learn, it does also have some other syntactical features — like a distinction between “open” and “closed” izâfa (noun-modifier link) constructions, and complex rules for pronominal clitics and prepositions— that seem more complicated than Kurmanji.
Although speakers of Kurmanji and Sorani both generally self-identify as Kurdish by ethnicity, the two “dialects” could really be considered different languages. There are a few smaller languages which are sometimes also viewed as “Kurdish dialects” which are even more linguistically distinct: the Zaza (or Dimili) language in Turkey, and Gorani in Iran. I’ve gotten my hands on grammatical sketches of both (about a hundred pages each) but have only skimmed them.
Other Iranian languages
Apart from Persian and Kurdish, the only other Iranian language I’ve spent significant time studying is Pashto. I spent a few months studying it while in journalism school (around the same time that I was brushing up on my Persian), and then briefly revisited it again last fall when Afghanistan was in the news, but never really got very far on either attempt.
The main resources I used were produced by the U.S. government’s Center for Applied Linguistics in the 1990s, including basic- and intermediate-level textbooks, a reader, and a reference grammar — although I only really got through the reference grammar and about ten lessons in the beginner textbook. One other textbook I used was published in 1979 in East Germany, of all places. I got all the way to the end of that book, but went a bit too fast to retain everything long-term.
Grammatically, Pashto is also significantly more complicated than Persian, with grammatical gender, direct and oblique cases, and split ergativity like Kurmanji and Hindustani.
And Pashto’s verb system is even more complicated still, with an odd resemblance to the Slavic verb aspect system: most verbs come in pairs of imperfective and perfective forms, both of which can be conjugated in the present or the past, with “perfective present” having a future meaning. Perfective forms are often derived from imperfective forms by adding a prefix, but for many common verbs the two roots have to be learned separately.
I also found Pashto vocabulary to be a bit harder to learn than Kurdish, because Pashto is an Eastern Iranian language whereas Persian and Kurdish are Western Iranian.
Speaking of Eastern Iranian languages, one other Iranian language I’ve thought about learning a bit of is… Ossetian, which despite being located to the northwest of Iran in the Caucasus Mountains is more closely related to other languages in the Eastern group. (It’s because of the Scythians.) I’ve only read one Ossetian grammar book — A Grammatical Sketch of Ossetic—and looked at a few Russian textbooks, but found them to be hard to use. On the other hand, I have been able to find some Ossetian TV shows on Youtube.
One big difficulty with trying to learn Ossetian is the vocabulary: not only is the language much more distantly related to Persian, but it’s also been less influenced by Perso-Arabic literary culture because most Ossetians are Orthodox Christians.
Before I wrap things up, one last thing I wanted to touch on in this post was the more ancient Iranian languages, none of which I can say I’ve actually studied, although I’ve thought about it: I’ve acquired textbooks for everything from Avestan and Old Persian to Bactrian and Sogdian, but given up as soon I take a look at their complicated noun declension tables. 😅
As I mentioned in my post about Aramaic last time, the Persian Achaemenid Empire played a big role in the spread of Aramaic as a lingua franca in the Near East, so it’s not surprising that some Aramaic and Hebrew words can be traced back to Old Persian roots. For example, Hebrew pitgam/פתגם (“proverb”) is related to Persian payghām and payām (“message”) — and therefore also to Kurmanji peyiv (“word”) as mentioned above, as well as payāmbar (“prophet”).
Later on, in Middle Persian (a.k.a. Pahlavi), many words would be written as “Aramaeograms”, spelled with their Aramaic spelling but pronounced as their Middle Persian synonyms (a bit like how Japanese uses Chinese characters… but even more confusing!).
And while Arabic loaned a huge amount of words into Persian after the rise of Islam, some words also went in the opposite direction in an earlier period. One interesting example is barnāmaj/برنامج (“program”), which comes from Middle Persian bar-nāmag, which might have been coined as a translation of Greek pro-gramma. The fact that the final “j” or “g” was preserved is a sign that the word was borrowed at an earlier time: in modern Persian, “program” is barnāme instead.
Meanwhile, ancient Iranian languages played a big role in cultural exchanges towards the east as well. For example, the transmission of Manichaeism and Christianity to China along the Silk Roak — also something I mentioned in my last post — was largely carried out by Sogdians. And An Lushan, a Tang dynasty general who started a major uprising in the mid-8th century, was of mixed Sogdian and Turkic descent.
On the linguistic side, Iranian languages have left a few interesting traces in Chinese: the word for “grape”, 葡萄/pútáo, is related to Persian bāde (“wine”), and the word for “coral”, 珊瑚 /shānhú, is related to Persian sang (“stone”), for example.
There’s one more interesting aspect of Iranian languages’ relations with neighboring languages that I left out from this article: the massive influence that old Iranian languages like Parthian have had on Armenian vocabulary, perhaps accounting for more than 50 percent of Armenian’s basic vocabulary.
The reason I left that out, of course, is that I’ll be going into it in more depth next time around, in my article on Armenian.
The funny thing is, about a month ago I was starting get tired of Armenian and considered giving it up entirely. But then I found some new resources for the language and had a bit of a breakthrough — to the point that I’ve decided to take a break from Kurdish instead. So another thing I’ll be looking at in my next article will be how I stay motivated to study different languages (or fail to do so, as the case may be). Until next time!
