mountains of thé present Kdrdistan, under the reign of the
Achæmenidæ. The Carduehi, the Kipnoi, the Vopdvalpi, the
' Kordiæi, the Gordiani, were all apparently the same .people,
and most probably the ancesfors of* the present Kdrds.*
Their name is derived by Strabo from KapSa, which, as he
says, meant robber” in the ancient Persian language.
Under the title of Kudraha, or- Gudraha, which has been
read in cuneiform letters in thetable of nations suty-eet to
Darius on the walls of Persepolis,f it isisupposed by Lassen
that the Kûrds are designated ; and this opinion has been
adopted by the learned Karl Ritter. Kudraha,. or.. Kurdistan,
comes in this table.in its proper geographical situation,
between Armenia and Assyria.J
An inquiry into the relationship of the Kurdish language
affords the only chance of elucidating- the .origin., and
affinity of that people. Without this aid we cqpld ;neyer
discover whether they belonged to the Arlan or tp>the Syro-
Arabian race. To Father Garzoni,-©£the Propaganda?* and
to Hoernle, a missionary who in later times resided'un ion g
the Kurds, we chiefly owe the means which have, enabled
philologers to pursue this inquiry with - success. The
missionaries have furnished information on the grammatical
forms of the language, as welL ds vocabularies, and some
poetical compositions have been obtained by Von Hammer
and Mr. Rich. These materials have been examined by
M. M. Roëdiger and Pott.§ Thè-following is a very brief
abstract of the results, as far as they are important tö our
present purpose.!—
The idiom of the Kurds, both in respect to its grammatical
structure and its constituent vocabulary, is allied to the Persian
family of languages. It has, indeed, a near affinity to
the modem Persian branch of these dialects, though more
corrupted and less cultivated or developed as a written
idiom. Its corruption is thé result of its having been
abandoned entirely to the arbitrary changes which befal
- * Strabo, lib. 16. Ritter, B. 6. p. 90.
t Lassen, Keil-schrift, s. 84-86.
Î Hoernle im Basel-Missions-Magaz. Jahrg, 1837.—Citedby Ritter, p. 627.
§ Zeitschrift fiir Kunde deg Morgenlandes.—Ritter’s Erdkunde, Th. 9. p. 28.6.
idioms used merely for popular and oral communication.
To a certain' point* though dialectically different from the
Parsi, it seems to have* 'approached more nearly to that
dial ect&;ii but from the’time when the Parsi became a written
language/-“ they have followed rapidly a very different
career. The Kdfcl and the Parsi are related at nearly equal
degreesto the Zend, and among themselves they may rather
be termed cognate than sister languages.
, Both the Parsi.andthe<K€rdish have derived considerable
additions !bf Arabic words, which were introduced at
;ih^ira'{bf tfie^Mdhammbdam^codque^ ’ aa^ foany Turkish
' words ' have, been adopted, .by the,^northern and western
Kdrd's; 1 yét neither Arabic? nor Turkish words or grammatical
forms < Constitute any- part óf thé real Kurdish
idiom :• terms derived from both these sources are
foreign in the Kdrdish language, as are, likewise, the
numerous Words - of. Syrian origin, adopted from time to
time, as it would appear, from the Chaldeans, or Nestorians,
who* inhabit hamlets in thé neighbourhood of the. Kurds,
r .There are many dialects- o f the' Kdrdish language which
differ more or less from- each other. The Guran dialect is
now„ spoken' iü ’ the scourt at. 'Senna. Rich has given a
comparative vocabulary of the proper Kurdish', that is, the
dialect o f Suleimhmyeh, with the Bulbassi, Lor, and Feili
dialects.- The Missionary Hoernle says, that the northern
dialects are-So .much alike that, the people of different
provinces understand each other*. To the northern tribés,
he refers the Mekri, the Hakkhri, and the Shakak, and
the somewhat more remote dialect of the Yezides. These
four branches are separate stems of the Kurdish language.
The Kdrdish tribes to whom they belong inhabit the mountains
to the west, south, and north-west of lake Urumiyeb;
from thence as far as Senna, and further to Suleimknlyeh,
Media, and Diarbekir; and then back to lake Vhn. The
idiom which is intermediate between the northern and
southern dialects, and is, therefore, the 71 most generally
understood, is according to Hoernle, the Shekara dialect.
On the southern branch of the Kdrdish language Hoernle
bbtained less satisfactory information. He "refers* to this