TAC 13/14 - Set - Sorani, Persian, Kurmanji

[Set]

I moved to Kurdistan about a week ago. I have a job here teaching English, but that is means to learn Kurdish. I'll be here for a year and I hope to get a good level of Sorani, hopefully some Kurmanji since there are Kurmanji speakers around (and I have a Kurmanji TV Channel in my flat) and I aim to get my Persian up to a fluent conversational level by practising with the many Persian speakers here. I also might try and learn some Turkish since there are quite a few here and I brought some books with me


[flag]ku[/flag] Sorani: Aiming for C1 in all skills.
[flag]fa[/flag] Fluent conversational level, more vocab.
[flag]ku[/flag] Kurmanji: A good passive understanding of written and spoken language.
[flag]tr[/flag] Be able to read simple texts and have simple conversations.

Also:
[flag]ca[/flag] Maintain level by reading and watching TV.
[flag]de[/flag] Find German speakers here (there are quite a few) and stop my German from rusting away further.
[flag]sw[/flag] Work through book that I have, maybe try and get some speaking practice.
[flag]fr[/flag] I'm currently doing the duolingo course, I would like to be able to read French easily.

[Limagne]

Fantastic! Hope you're enjoying yourself there!

I'll be following your log (which makes me think that I should update mine too ).

It's really interesting to see that the Iraqi Kurdistan is such a multilingual place. I had no idea there was a sizeable Persian-speaking community in Erbil. Do you hear a lof of Arabic too?

In another thread you also mentioned that a lot of people could understand Bahdini/Kurmanji. Do people reply in their native Sorani when adressed in another dialect?

Anyway, good luck with your studies. Sorani seems to have a rather quirky grammar, to say the least

Reading French shouldn't be too much of a challenge for you though, since you're already proficient in Catalan.

[Meera]

Salaam Set! chetore? I cant wait to see your updates

[voron]

Impressive language list, I wish you luck! How widely is Arabic spoken in Erbil?

[Set]

Thanks for the responses

There are quite a few different languages spoken here, but Sorani is by far the most common. There are lots of people who fled or moved to Iran and then came back speaking Persian and sometimes with children who were brought up speaking both Persian and Sorani. I think there are also a number of Iranians who have moved here. There's quite a lot of immigration from other parts of Asia because of the economic boom.
There are quite a few Arabs, many are tourists since Erbil is the Arab tourism capital (despite not being Arab) and then there are obviously quite a few Arabs who would rather live in the safe Kurdistan instead of the more dangerous parts in the south, but I think the situation really requires them to learn Kurdish since many people, especially the younger generation who have never really been part of Iraq, don't speak Arabic.
As well the Turks who've come for economic purposes, there are Turcomen who have lived here for generations and in the christian quarter there are christian Assyrians who write in the Aramaic script (I've seen a few elections posters with it).
I can't tell yet if people can have a conversation where one speaker is speaking Sorani and the other Bahdini, but I was taken to buy a sim-card at the bazaar the other day by a guy who is actually Bangladeshi, but who speaks Sorani and the guy selling the cards seemed to be responding in what sounded like Bahdini. I don't know if he was speaking straight up Bahdini or whether he was speaking Sorani but with a Bahdini accent, i.e. with 'v' instead of 'w'.


Also, last night I went to the big expat end of the week party at the German bar (which is fucking expensive) and met a group of Kenyans (!!) including an Punjabi guy who was born in Nairobi and a Syrian Kurd who wants to help me learn Kurmanji

I should also say that the people here are very good looking and I've probably seen here some of the most handsome men that I've ever seen. I also think that the hijab can sometimes make girls look even more attractive although actually here in the city it may only be about 50% that wear hijab.

Today or tomorrow I'm going to try and find a bookshop and hopefully a good English/Kurdish dictionary, although I might have to wait until I get paid to buy it

[Saim]

Awesome Set, good luck! That's cool that you've managed to find Persian and Swahili speakers in Erbil. I wonder whether many Iraqi Turkmen know Turkish - apparently their varieties of Oghuz Turkic are closer than those spoken in Southern Azerbaijan than Turkey. I also think it's cool you're learning both Kurmanji and Sorani.

How are you finding the duolinguo French course? I can already read French fairly well, and I'd like to be able to understand it better spoken... but whenever I start learning I get bored and stop.

Anyway, do keep us updated!

[Set]

Hey Saim! Did you get my message through Martyna's phone yesterday? It was so bizarre us talking to someone about you whilst sitting in a bar in Iraq

I think the Turcomen are quite close to Turkey, or at least Turkey supports them for its own nefarious reasons. There are a lot in Kirkuk and Turkey wants that to be a Turcoman autonomous region...oh and look theirs a shit load of oil. There was a Syrian Kurd there last night too who was trying to get me to learn Kurmanji instead of Sorani

The duolingo course is alright, not amazing, but it's easy to just go through it. I have the same problem that I get bored studying French, but there are words that aren't like Catalan or Spanish words so I need to learn them to be able to understand and I think the course is good for that.

[Saim]

No I didn't get any message. :/ Yeah, flipo that you're both there.

Definitely, I was going through the Duolinguo course a little bit as well but got bored, I should probably just go through it so that I end up doing something. I even just bought a Hebrew reader with translations and glossaries in French, so it'd be good to know it better...

[Set]

On Friday and Saturday I bought some amazing books for learning Sorani and I feel quite confident that I get learn quite quickly with them. One of them is big Kurdish-German dictionary and it's just great, already one of my favourite books. Then yesterday there was a suicide attack in the city and I was worried that I might have to leave, however, for the moment, my resolve to learn Kurdish has only increased and that means I need to stay here longer. We'll see what happens.

[voron]

Good luck and take care.

I heard Kurdish for the first time live last weekend. I was having a small talk with a Turkish guy I met at a kebap shop. Someone called him and he switched to a different language. I asked him if it was Kurdish when he finished talking and he confirmed. I didn't feel very comfortable asking which dialect it was though.

[Set]

I've been a hundred percent focusing on Sorani recently. I've been trying to study loads of sentences and words on Anki and I'm reading a parallel text book (although the stories are tacky moral stories that make my stomach turn a little). I'm really having a problem understanding people though. I know it's normal at this early stage and I always have a problem with that, but there are some extra obstacles like Hewleri pronunciation which differs a lot from the 'standard'. Also it's doubly frustrating because a lot of the time I know most of the words and can make out the meaning of the sentence if it's slowed down, but I'm finding it impossible to distinguish words at the moment. Anyway, I am really enjoying just eating up words and seeing the grammar in action in sentences and texts.

I also wrote a new blog post on some of the pronunciation differences and I don't think anyone on facebook will find it interesting so I'm putting it up here:
http://xarlata.blogspot.com/2013/10/hawleri-sorani-kurdish.html

[Limagne]

The article you wrote is very informative!

This reminded me that the same phenomenon is supposed to occur in Iraqi arabic (with the letter ک being pronounced as چ). It is often assumed that this change is the result of Persian influence. But it actually may have something to do with the dialects of Kurdish spoken in the Hewler region. What a fascinating discovery

I think the letter ج also becomes /dz/ in various dialects of Persian, most notably Esfahani. I've already heard the letter چ pronunced like a kind of /ts/ sound too. So the sentence پسر جون چه میگی ؟ might sound like /peser dzun tse migi/. But I suppose there's no direct connection.

[eskandar]

This reminded me that the same phenomenon is supposed to occur in Iraqi arabic (with the letter ک being pronounced as چ). It is often assumed that this change is the result of Persian influence. But it actually may have something to do with the dialects of Kurdish spoken in the Hewler region.

The same phenomenon (ك pronounced as 'ch') occurs in rural Palestinian dialects where there is no contact with Kurdish whatsoever, as well as some Bedouin dialects IIRC. So I don't think it's a result of Kurdish influence. It may just be a coincidence.

I think the letter ج also becomes /dz/ in various dialects of Persian, most notably Esfahani. I've already heard the letter چ pronunced like a kind of /ts/ sound too. So the sentence پسر جون چه میگی ؟ might sound like /peser dzun tse migi/. But I suppose there's no direct connection.

As you probably know this is also typical of some Azeri dialects (Tabrizi, for example, as well as the variety spoken by Iraqi Turkmens).

[Set]

The same phenomenon (ك pronounced as 'ch') occurs in rural Palestinian dialects where there is no contact with Kurdish whatsoever, as well as some Bedouin dialects IIRC. So I don't think it's a result of Kurdish influence. It may just be a coincidence.

It could well be that the Arabic influenced the Kurdish. The Kurdish here seems to be a lot more Arabic influenced than the Sulamaniyah dialect anyway.

[Set]

I haven't had a lot of time recently to add many words to anki, which is my primary method of studying at the moment, because of work, but a friend recently found Rudaw on my TV, so I've been leaving that on in the background and I'm beginning to notice that my listening comprehension is slightly improving. Some people are very surprised that I know how to read and write the script and I think some don't even believe that I can do that. Some of my students are very pleased that I'm learning Kurdish which is always nice as feedback for your effort. The other teachers speak in Kurdish in the teachers' room and think I can't understand anything they're saying, but I'm slowly picking up a few things. I'm really hoping for a 13th Warrior style moment

[Set]

I wrote a new blog post. It's not language related, but it's about my experience here, so some people might find it interesting. I don't really want to post it on facebook since it could be a bit of a delicate subject.
Anyway if you're interested it's about the attack that happened about a month ago: http://xarlata.blogspot.com/2013/11/this-is-iraq.html

[Set]

A gloss of some Sorani sentences: http://xarlata.blogspot.com/2013/11/sorani-gloss.html

[Zireael]

Oh wow, I love the gloss. Any tips on how to type such a gloss so that it all aligns and fits? I'd love to do something similar with Arabic.

[Set]

Well on Blogger you just have to kind of work it out and keep checking the preview, but after a while you can kind of work out how much space you need.
I also did one for Swahili a while back: http://xarlata.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-swahili-gloss.html

On an unrelated note, I accidentally told my friend he was gang-violated the other day. I meant to say he was suspicious but I muddled up the word for suspicion 'guman' and the word for sin 'gonah'. So the word suspicious is 'gumanlêkraw' which means someone who has suspicion done to them, but I said 'gonahlêkraw' meaning someone who has something sinful done to them, i.e. violated somehow by a group of people. Oops.

[Set]

Long time since I last updated this. The original plans seem quite risible now. I'm focusing completely on Sorani now so I've dropped everything else apart from French which I'm only studying through duolingo as a sort of easy distraction.
My reading in Sorani is pretty good now, as in I can read news articles and only need to look up a few words - I might try and get some work translating news articles if I can. Everything is pretty poor, but then I always learn reading the quickest. For listening I find a short news clip every day and watch it repeatedly and it seems to be having some effect. Here is my clip for today, the reporter is a friend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHIIwSZ3DsE

I'm planning on quitting my job at the end of the week once I'm paid, theyre really dodgy people, so if I tell them I want to quit in advance I probably won't get paid. I'll then spend a month or so in Erbil purely studying (I'm trying to find someone to teach me daily) and hopefully I'll improve my speaking then.


I'm enjoying Sorani a lot. There are lots of interesting constructions, although unfortunately few people to share them with since few Kurdish people really understand their grammar and none of the expats I know are interested in learning the language - some are trying to learn Arabic. An example of what I'm talking about:

کتێبەکەی پێ دام
He gave me the book

If we break it down:
kitêb-eke-y pê da-m

kitêb = book
eke = definite article
-y = third person enclitic pronoun (here the "subject" of the action)
pê = to (this form is used when it comes after the noun)
da = gave (third person, here agreeing with book)
-m = first person enclitic pronoun

This is what happens when an split-ergative language loses its cases and genders. It also brings into question what the 'pê' should be called; it's acting like a preposition, but it's neither pre-, nor circum-, nor post- the indirect object. Although because this construction is so 'bizarre' it actually makes it easier to remember and so this doesn't tend to be where I make mistakes.