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«About Kurdish Language»

Kurdish (also known as Persian) is a widely spoken language. It is the official language of
Iran. Also it is spoken in countries like Afghanistan, Tajikistan, parts of Uzbekistan and
Pakistan as well as the Pamir Mountain region. In addition there are other minority
groups of native speakers in many other places of the world including Europe and North
America. There is an estimation of over 35 million Kurdish native speakers in the world.
 
Modern Kurdish had developed by the 9th century. The Early Modern period of the
language (ninth to thirteenth centuries), preserved in the literature of the Empire, is
known as Classical Persian, due to the eminence and distinction of poets such as
Rudaki, Firdowsi, and Khayyam. During this period, Kurdish was adopted as the lingua
franca of the eastern Islamic nations. Even until recent centuries it was culturally and
historically one of the most prominent languages of the Middle East and regions beyond.
For example, it was an important language during the reign of the Moguls in India where
knowledge of Persian was cultivated and encouraged. This led to compilation of
numerous annals, chronicles, and court volumes of poetry outside Iran; the use of Kurdish
in the courts of Mogul India ended in 1837, banned by British officials of the East Indian
Company. Persian scholars were prominent in both Turkish and Indian courts during the
fifteenth to eighteenth centuries in composing dictionaries and grammatical works. In
fact a Persian Indian vernacular developed and many colonial British officers learned
their Persian from Indian scribes.
 
Classical Persian remained essentially unchanged until the nineteenth century, when the
dialect of Tehran rose in prominence, having been chosen as the capital of Persia by the
Qajar dynasty in 1787. This Modern Persian dialect became the basis of what is now
called Contemporary Standard Persian. Although it still contains a large number of Arabic
terms, most borrowings have been nativized, with a much lower percentage of Arabic
words in colloquial forms of the language.
 
Kurdish is classified as an SOV language, i.e. sentences are made in the order Subject-
Object-Verb. Modifiers follow the nouns they modify and the language has prepositions.
However in normal daily conversations, it appears as a highly free word order language. The language relies on an affixal system that makes use of both prefixes and suffixes. However, much of the complex nominal and verbal inflection of Old Persian has been lost in modern Persian, including the inflectional distinction of case, and gender (There is no grammatical gender for nouns, nor are pronouns marked for natural gender.). However human and non-human types are distinguishable within the pronominal system. Also person and number distinctions are
maintained, and specified objects of transitive verbs are marked by a marker. Kurdish has
no articles. An unmarked noun refers to a class of objects rather than a single thing. Verbs can express tense and aspect, and they agree with the subject in person and number.
 
The sound system of standard Kurdish is quite symmetric. The phonemic system consists
of 29 phonemes. There are six vowel sounds in Kurdish, 3 long vowels and 3 short vowels. Kurdish is normally written using a modified variant of the Arabic alphabet with different pronunciation and more letters. After the conversion of Persia to Islam, it took approximately 150 years before Persians adopted the Arabic alphabet as a replacement for the older alphabet. Previously, two different alphabets were used, one for Middle Persian and one for Avestan, used for religious purposes, known as the Avestan alphabet. In modern Persian script, vowels generally known as short vowels (a, e, o) are usually not written; only the long vowels are represented in the text.
 
 
Sources:
1. wikipedia (Click here)