Ancient Kurdish language? A thread:
APPARENTLY, this is an old Kurdish alphabet that is documented by Ibn Wahshiyya from his book Shawq al-Mustaham written in 863(?) CE.
He writes:
"During my stay at Damascus, I met with two books, one of them on the culture of the vine and the palm tree, the other on water, and the means of finding it out in unknown ground, I translated them both from the Kurdic language into Arabic, for the benefit of mankind..
..this is the reason this treatise was not finished before. I finished it at last, with Heaven’s assistance, after one and twenty years, and have, by the grace of God, attained the object proposed. I deposited it in the treasury of the Caliph Abd-al-Malik bin Marwan: be his...
reign glorious, and may he be the everlasting column of the faith!"
Additionally he writes:
"I saw at Bagdad, thirty-three inscriptions written in this alphabet."
Egyptian scholar Daria Auni states that this alphabet was written from left to right.
Here are the English equivalents of the letters. He was unable to provide equivalents for 7 letters.
Also, "mistakes" have been made in the translations (in my opinion, I believe they were attempts to erase the Kurdish identity of this alphabet (but that's up for debate).
For example, when it was translated into English in 1806 it was noted that this alphabet was "unknown"...
However, the original Arabic text uses the word "Qadima" which in Arabic means old/ancient.
The Arabic text reads: I saw in a sarcophagus in Baghdad, thirty books (and not thirty three inscriptions!) written in this alphabet, I possessed two books out of these in Levant..
...(Arabic: wa kan indi minha bishsham kitabayn), and translated them from Kurdish to Arabic.
AND, surprise, surprise, the original translator is famous for being proud of his Chaldean heritage (which is why I think the 'mistakes' are intentional)
The English translations states: We are ignorant to what alphabet these letters belong, as we never could make out the language which they express, while the original Arabic text reads: For the rest of these letters (i.e. the last seven undecipherable ones), we could not...
find any equivalents in any other language". Which makes sense because Kurdish belongs to a different language family.
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