Languagle #7: Kurdish (Kurmanji)
Her giya li ser koka xwe hêşîn tê
"Every plant grows green on its own root."
What it means
People are like plants: they grow from their own roots. It's said in favour of standing on your own feet and staying close to where you come from.
How to say it
her gih-YAH lih ser KO-ka khweh heh-SHEEN teh
Say x like the ch in Scottish loch. ê is a long eh, î a long ee, and plain i a short, quick ih.
Word by word
- Her her: every
- giya gih-YAH: plant, grass
- li ser lih ser: on
- koka xwe KO-ka khweh: its own root (kok, root; xwe, own)
- hêşîn heh-SHEEN: green
- tê teh: comes, here 'grows'
Where it was found
In Kurmanji a proverb is a gotina pêşiyan, 'a saying of the ancestors'. This one is from a Kurdish blog that lists proverbs with Turkish translations, and the English comes from the Turkish.
Similar sayings
- English: Every tub must stand on its own bottom. Everyone has to rely on themselves.
How to recognise Kurdish (Kurmanji)
Kurmanji Kurdish is written in a Latin alphabet modelled on Turkish, so it shares ç and ş. What gives it away are vowels with a circumflex, ê, î and û, and the letters x, q and w, which Turkish doesn't use. Turkish, for its part, has ğ, ö, ü and the dotless ı, which Kurmanji doesn't. Sorani, the other big Kurdish variety, is written in Arabic script.
About the Kurdish (Kurmanji) language
Kurmanji, or Northern Kurdish, is the most widely spoken form of Kurdish, an Iranian language. It is spoken by an estimated 15 million or more people across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, a region without a state of its own. Kurmanji is usually written in a Latin alphabet (the Hawar alphabet, devised in the 1930s), while Sorani Kurdish in Iraq and Iran uses an Arabic-based script.
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