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Page 3
“...A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOUTHERN KURDISH,
1937-1944
By C. J. EDMONDS, C.M.G., C.B.E.
IN the Society’s Journal for July, 1937, will be found a Bibliography
of Kurdish Periodicals and Books published in Iraq up to the end of
1936, with a short introduction on the distribution of Kurdish dialects.
Twenty-four years have now elapsed since the first number of
Peshbetvtin (September 20, 1920) was issued to a delighted Sulaimani,
and a quarter of a century since Kurdish was made for the first time the
official language of an administration. The present is thus .perhaps an
appropriate moment to bring the record up to date and to analyse progress.
At first sight the literary output of the Kurds in this period seems to
have been astonishingly meagre. The four-page Peshkewtin, with
changes of the name to Bang y Kurdistan, Rhoj y Kurdistan, Umiyd y
Istyqlal, Jiyanewe and fiyan, has continued to appear in Sulaimani, as a
bi-weekly, weekly, or fortnightly, almost without interruption (the tem-
porary rival...”
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Page 5
“... scientific or even literary thoughts in those languages and
so tended to use the Arabic words already there present and naturalized;
it was the line of least resistance and, moreover, gave authors a comfort-
able feeling of superior learning or of genteelism. The encroaching forest
would naturally be particularly “unmanageable ” in war-time, when
countless new or unfamiliar objects and ideas, with their special vocabu-
lary, are pressed on the attention of the reading or listening public. In
Iraq these first reach the Kurds through the medium of the Arabic news-
papers or broadcasts, whose writers and speakers have perhaps themselves
invented (by literal translation), or selected, Arabic equivalents for the
new European words; without a conscious act of resistance, such words,
though quite new even in Arabic, would have been accepted into Kurdish
and so have enlarged the area of encroachment. Uninstructed resistance
might have led to chaos, and future generations will have to thank Taufiq...”
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