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This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985 Philadelphia police fired thousands of rounds at the MOVE house, city officials approved dropping an explosive device on the roof, the resulting fire was allowed to burn, 11 people—including five children—died, and 61 homes were destroyed. Philadelphia City Council later called it a “brutal attack carried out by the City of Philadelphia on its own citizens” and acknowledged that no individual faced criminal consequences for the bombing. One timeline correction worth preserving for the BHP record: the major previous MOVE-police confrontation was August 8, 1978, about seven years before the bombing, not a year or two earlier. Officer James Ramp was killed, other police and firefighters were wounded, nine MOVE members were later convicted, and television cameras recorded police beating Delbert Africa during his arrest. The 1985 MOVE Commission later specifically criticized city planners for failing to adequately use lessons from that 1978 confrontation. And that actually strengthens the point you’re making: 1985 did not happen without precedent or institutional memory. There had already been a deadly confrontation with MOVE, years of conflict, negotiations and police involvement before Osage Avenue.

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Wikipedia

Gorani language

This article is about the language spoken in Kurdistan. For the Slavic dialect, see Gorani dialect. For the Tupian language spoken in South America, see Guarani language.

Gorani
گۆرانی
Goranî
Native toIraq and Iran
RegionKurdistan (Primarily Hawraman, also Garmian and Nineveh), Kermanshah province
Native speakers
300,000 (2008)[1]
DialectsHawraman-I Luhon[4]
Hawraman-I Taxt[5]
Kakai[6]
Gawhara[7]
Kandula[8]
Zardayana[9]
Shabaki[10][11]
Ṣārlī[12][11]
Bāǰalāni (Bēǰwān)[13][14]
Gawrajuyi[15]
Kurdish alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3Variously:
hac – Gorani (Gurani)
sdb – Shabaki
sdf – Sarli
bjm – Bajelani
Glottologgura1251
ELP
Linguasphere58-AAA-b
Gorani (Hawrami) is classified as Definitely Endangered by the UNESCO
Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger

Gorani or Gurani[16] (Kurdish: گۆرانی, romanized: Goranî, lit. 'song'),[17] also known by the name of its main dialect, Hawrami (ھەورامی, romanized: Hewramî), is a Northwestern Iranian language[18][19][20] or a group of similar Northwestern Iranian dialects[21][22] spoken in small pockets in northeastern Iraq and northwestern Iran.[21]

Gorani is spoken in Iraq and Iran and has four dialects: Bajelani, Hawrami, and Sarli, some sources also include the Shabaki as a dialect of Gorani as well.[11] Of these, Hawrami was the traditional literary language and koiné of Kurds in the historical Ardalan region at the Zagros Mountains,[23][24] but has since been supplanted by Central Kurdish and Southern Kurdish.[25] Gorani is a literary language for many Kurds.[26]

History

[edit]

The linguistic homeland of the Gurani dialects is believed to be somewhere around the Caspian Sea. It is suggested that Gurani speakers migrated en bloc from the Caspian region to their present-day settlements at an unknown early date.[21][27][28][29]

Classification

[edit]

Gurani is a member of the Indo-European language family, belonging to the Northwestern Iranian branch of Iranian languages.[18][22] Ethnologue classifies it within a genetic subgroup called Zaza-Gorani, along with Zaza, within the Northwestern Iranian languages.[30]However, despite some similarities, significant linguistic differences were found between the two languages.[31][32]The Glottolog database proposes a detailed classification and classifies it within the Adharic subgroup.[33] Different treatment of Gorani from other Kurdish languages in linguistic works is based on the idea of Mackenzie in 1961. However, broader classifications of Kurdish languages include Gorani in the Kurdish language family.[34] Although early research was affected by colonial interests and oversimplification of the situation due to lack of access to the community, there were few decolonizing efforts.[35] Investigating the morphological features of Hawrami/Gorani with other Kurdish dialects shows that despite some differences, there are many similarities between them and, on a broader level, the similarities outweigh the differences. Western linguists, however, appear to have focused primarily on the differences.[36] Hawrami linguist Mihemed Emîn Hewramanî argued that Hawrami is a dialect within the unified tree of the Kurdish language, rather than an isolated external branch [37] Recentrly, despite the early sources, several peer-reviewed academic papers referred to Gorani and its dialects as a member of Kurdish languages.[38][39][40][41][42][43] The Dialect Atlas database classifies Hawrami as a member of the Kurdish language family.[44] Recent computational linguistics studies using machine learning, natural language processing, and deep learning classify Hawrami as a dialect of Kurdish.[45][46][47] Study of quantitative lexical similarity between Hawrami and other Kurdish dialects showed that lexical similarity between Hawrami and Kurmanji Kurdish is quite similar to Kurmanji and Sorani Kurdish.[48]

Dialects

[edit]

Gorani comprises a group of similar Northwestern Iranian dialects and consists of Kandula, Bāǰalānī, Šabaki, Ṣārlī and Hawrāmāni (Avromān).

Gorani dialects consist of Hawramani, Kakai, Zardayana, Bajalani and Shabaki.[21][18]

Gorani dialects lack gender and case, except for Hawrāmi.[49][50][51]

Bajelani

[edit]

Bajelani is a Gorani dialect[11] with about 59,000 speakers, predominately around Mosul,[52] near Khanaqin and near the Khosar valley.[53]

Hewrami

[edit]

Hewrami (Gurani: هەورامی, romanized: Hewramî) also known as Avromani, Awromani , Hawrami, or Horami, is a Gorani dialect and is regarded as the most archaic one.[54] It is mostly spoken in the Hawraman region, a mountainous region located in western Iran (Iranian Kurdistan) and northeastern Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan). There are around 23,000 speakers, and it was classed as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO in 2010.[55]

Due to concerns with the decline of Hawrami speakers, as people move away from the Hawraman region to cities such as Erbil, Jamal Habibullah Faraj Bedar, a retired teacher from Tawela, decided to translate the Qur'an from Arabic into Hawrami. The translation took two and a half months, and 1000 copies of the publication were printed in Tehran.[55]

Sarli

[edit]

Sarli is spoken in northern Iraq by a cluster of villages[56] north of the Little Zab river,[57] on the confluence of the Khazir River and the Great Zab river, just west-northwest of the city of Kirkuk.[58] It has fewer than 20,000 speakers.[59] Many speakers have been displaced by conflicts in the region.[60] It is reportedly most similar to Bajelani[60] but is also similar to Shabaki.[61] It contains Kurdish, Turkish and Persian influences, similar to its neighbours Bajelani and Shabaki.[62]

Shabaki

[edit]
Main article: Shabaki language

Phonology

[edit]

Consonants

[edit]
Labial Dental Alveolar Post-
alveolar 		Velar Uvular Pharyngeal Glottal
Nasal m n
Plosive aspirated pʰ tʰ t͡ʃʰ kʰ q [ʔ]
voiced b d d͡ʒ ɡ
Fricative voiceless f s ʃ x ħ h
voiced (v) ð z ʒ (ʁ) (ʕ)
Lateral plain l
velarized ɫ
Rhotic tap ɾ
trill r
Approximant w j

All voiceless plosives and affricates are aspirated.

  • A glottal stop [ʔ] may be heard before a word-initial vowel, but is not phonemic.
  • Sounds /ʕ ʁ/ only occur in loanwords.
  • /x/ can also be heard as [χ] among different dialects.
  • /q/ can also be aspirated as [qʰ].
  • The voiced /d/ may be lenited in post-vocal positions, and occur as a voiced dental approximant [ð̞]. In the Nawsud dialects, /d/ can be heard as an alveolar approximant sound [ɹ], and may also be devoiced when occurring in word-final positions as [ɹ̥].
  • In the Nawsud and Nodša dialects, a word-initial /w/ can be heard as a [v] or a labialized [vʷ].
  • /n/ when preceding velar consonants, is heard as a velar nasal [ŋ].[63]

Vowels

[edit]
Front Central Back
Close i u
Near-close ɪ ʊ
Close-mid e o
Mid ə
Open-mid ɛ ɔ
Near-open æ
Open a
  • Sounds /æ ə/ both can be realized as an open-mid [ɛ].[63]

Speakers

[edit]

Gorani had an estimated 180,000 speakers in Iran in 2007 and 120,000 speakers in Iraq as well in 2007 for a total of 300,000 speakers. Ethnologue and the Documentation of Endangered Languages reports that the language is threatened in both Iran and Iraq, and that speakers residing in Iraq includes all adults and some children; however, it does not mention if speakers are shifting to Sorani or not. Many speakers of Gorani in Iran also speak Sorani, Persian, as well as Southern Kurdish. Most speakers in Iraq also speak Sorani, while some also speak Mesopotamian Arabic. Furthermore, in the 2010 edition of UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger Gorani (Hawrami) was classified as an endangered north-western Iranic language.[64][65][66][67] Although some classify Gorani as linguistically distinct from the Kurdish language,[11][53][68] the great majority of its speakers consider their language to be Kurdish[a][70][71][72][53] while some oppose it and emphasize their own identity distinct from the Kurds.[73][74] Genetically, the Mitochondrial DNA of Hawrami speakers shows a high similarity with the ancestors of the Kurdish people, who were living in the Bronze Age.[75] Also, a single nucleotide polymorphism study of Interferon-induced transmembrane protein 3 and interleukin-6 on Hawrami and Sorani speakers showed high genetic similarity between these two groups.[76] A genetic study on Kurds living in Iran showed no significant differences between Hawrami speakers and other Kurds in the country.[77]

Literature

[edit]
Main article: Ardalan § Gorani Culture in Ardalan

Under the independent rulers of Ardalan (9th–14th / 14th–19th century), with their capital latterly at Sanandaj, Gorani became the vehicle of a considerable corpus of poetry. Gorani was and remains the first language of the scriptures of the Ahl-e Haqq sect, or Yarsanism, centered on Gahvara. Prose works, in contrast, are hardly known. The structure of Gorani verse is very simple and monotonous. It consists almost entirely of stanzas of two rhyming half-verses of ten syllables each, with no regard to the quantity of syllables.

The names of forty classical poets writing in Gorani are known, but the details and dates of their lives are unknown for the most part. Perhaps the earliest writer is Mele Perîşan, author of a masnavi of 500 lines on the Shi'ite faith who is reported to have lived around 1356–1431. Other poets are known from the 17th–19th centuries and include Shaykh Mustafa Takhtayi, Khana Qubadi, Yusuf Yaska, Mistefa Bêsaranî and Khulam Rada Khan Arkawazi. One of the last great poets to complete a book of poems (divan) in Gurani is Mawlawi Tawagozi south of Halabja.

The Kurdish Shahnameh is a collection of epic poems that has been passed down orally from one generation to the next. Eventually, some of these stories were written down by Almas Khan-e Kanoule'ei in the 18th century. There exist also a dozen or more long epic or romantic masnavis, mostly translated by anonymous writers from Persian literature including: Bijan and Manijeh, Khurshid-i Khawar, Khosrow and Shirin, Layla and Majnun, Shirin and Farhad, Haft Khwan-i Rostam and Sultan Jumjuma. Manuscripts of these works are currently preserved in the national libraries of Berlin, London, and Paris.

Example of Gorani poetry

[edit]

An excerpt from Şîrîn û Xesrew (Shirin and Khosrow), written in 1740 by Khana Qubadî:[78]

Herçen mewaçan: Fersî şekeren
Kurdî ce şeker bell şîrînteren
Yeqînen ce dewr dunyay pirr endêş
Herkes dillşaden we ziwan wêş

Translation:

Although it's said that Persian is sweet as sugar,
But, for me Kurdish is sweeter than sugar
Clearly, in this perfidious world,
Everyone is happy with his own beautiful mother tongue.

[edit]
  • Partial tree of Indo-European languages.[79]
    Partial tree of Indo-European languages.[79]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ a b Gorani (Gurani) at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
    Shabaki at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
    Sarli at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
    Bajelani at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
  2. ^ "A Working Classification". Archived from the original on 16 October 2021. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
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  6. ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). "Kakai". Glottolog . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
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  8. ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). "Kandula". Glottolog . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
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  50. ^ MacKenzie 2002: "...only Hawrāmī has preserved a further consistent distinction of two grammatical genders.'"
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  71. ^ Jügel, Thomas (15 July 2016). "Parvin Mahmoudveysi, Denise Bailey. The Gorani language of Zarda, a village of West Iran". Abstracta Iranica. 34–36. doi:10.4000/abstractairanica.41149. ISSN 0240-8910.
  72. ^ Sheyholislami, Jaffer (2015). "Language Varieties of the Kurds". In Taucher, W.; Vogl, M.; Webinger, P. (eds.). The Kurds: History, religion, language, politics. Vienna: Austrian Ministry of the Interior. pp. 30–51. Archived from the original on 19 December 2024. Retrieved 7 May 2024.
  73. ^ Gholami, Saloumeh (2024). Gorani in Its Historical and Linguistic Context. Berlin: De Gruyter. pp. 17–22. ISBN 978-3111168685. In such contexts, they assert the distinctiveness of their ethnic and linguistic background, emphasizing the unique aspects of their Gorani heritage as separate from Kurdish identity.
  74. ^ Sadjadi, Sayyed Mahdi (2023). "Gorani: A Distinct and Independent Language Not a Variety of the So-called Kurdish" (PDF). International Journal of Language and Linguistics. 10 (3): 23–24. The use of these terms and the existence of these attitudes among both the Kurds and Gorans towards each other demonstrate that Gorani is not Kurdish and the Gorans are not Kurdish since both of them make use of such terms frequently and have such attitudes towards each other substantiating their distinction and separateness both linguistically and ethnically.
  75. ^ "The Phylogeny of Kurdish Populations: A Genetic and Historical Review". Rojava Journal of Science and Technology. 2 (1). 31 March 2026.
  76. ^ Rashid, Peshnyar M.A.; Salih, Gaza F. (June 2023). "Genetic polymorphism between the Sorani and Hawrami kurdish populations and COVID-19 outcome". Molecular Biology Reports. 50 (6): 5177–5183. doi:10.1007/s11033-023-08448-8. PMC 10148000. PMID 37119412.
  77. ^ Zarei, Fatah; Rajabi-Maham, Hassan (December 2016). "Phylogeography, genetic diversity and demographic history of the Iranian Kurdish groups based on mtDNA sequences". Journal of Genetics. 95 (4): 767–776. doi:10.1007/s12041-016-0692-4. PMID 27994175.
  78. ^ Xanay Qubadî, Şîrîn û Xesrew, (Saxkirdnewey Ferheng û Pîşekî: Muhemmed Mela Kerîm) Archived 13 September 2019 at the Wayback Machine, Korrî Zanyarî Kurd, Bexda 1975.
  79. ^ Authors, Multiple (19 January 2013). "worldhistory". worldhistory.com by Multiple authors. Retrieved 19 December 2021.

Works cited

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Notes

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  1. ^ The speakers of Gorani considered their language as Kurdish.[69]

Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.

Wikipedia

Gorani language

Gorani or Gurani (Kurdish: گۆرانی, romanized: Goranî, lit. 'song'), also known by the name of its main dialect, Hawrami (ھەورامی, romanized: Hewramî), is a Northwestern Iranian language or a group of similar Northwestern Iranian dialects spoken in small pockets in northeastern Iraq and northwestern Iran. Gorani is spoken in Iraq and Iran and has four dialects: Bajelani, Hawrami, and Sarli, some sources also include the Shabaki as a dialect of Gorani as well. Of these, Hawrami was the traditional literary language and koiné of Kurds in the historical Ardalan region at the Zagros Mountains, but has since been supplanted by Central Kurdish and Southern Kurdish. Gorani is a literary language for many Kurds.

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Wikipedia

Shabaki language

Shabaki is a Northwestern Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. The Shabaki language is spoken by the Shabak people in the Mosul region of northern Iraq. Although classified as a distinct Northwestern Iranian language, the language has been influenced by the Arabic, Turkish and Persian languages.

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Wikipedia

Kurdish language

Kurdish (Kurdî, کوردی, pronounced [kʊrdiː] ) is a Northwestern Iranian language or group of languages spoken by Kurds in the region of Kurdistan, namely in southeast Turkey, northern Iraq, northwest Iran, and northern Syria. It is also spoken in northeast Iran, as well as in certain areas of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Kurdish varieties constitute a dialect continuum except for Zaza, with some mutually unintelligible varieties, and collectively have 29 million native speakers. The main varieties of Kurdish are Kurmanji, Sorani, and Southern Kurdish (Xwarîn). The majority of the Kurds speak Kurmanji, and most Kurdish texts are written in Kurmanji and Sorani. Kurmanji is written in the Hawar alphabet, a derivation of the Latin script, and Sorani is written in the Sorani alphabet, a derivation of the Arabic script. A separate group of non-Kurdish Northwestern Iranian languages, the Zaza–Gorani languages, are also spoken by several million ethnic Kurds. The literary output in Kurdish was mostly confined to poetry until the early 20th century, when more general literature became developed. Today, the two principal written Kurdish dialects are Kurmanji and Sorani. Sorani is, along with Arabic, one of the two official languages of Iraq and is in political documents simply referred to as "Kurdish".

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Wikipedia

Talysh language

Talysh (تؤلشه زوؤن, Tolışə Zıvon, Tолышә зывон) is a Northwestern Iranian language spoken in the northern regions of the Iranian provinces of Gilan and Ardabil and the southern regions of the Republic of Azerbaijan by the Talysh people. The Talysh language is closely related to the Tati and Zaza languages and shares common isogloss and many linguistic features, structures and characteristic words with both Zaza and Tati. Talysh, along with Zaza and Tati, is located at the westernmost part of the Western Iranian languages. Talysh has three main dialects; northern, central and southern and these dialects consist of numerous sub-dialects. The northern dialect of the language is spoken in Azerbaijan and Iran, the central and southern dialects are spoken in Iran. The number of Talysh speakers was estimated to be around 218.000 people in 2016. Talysh is partially, but not fully, mutually intelligible with Persian. Talysh is classified as "vulnerable" by UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.

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