A NEW PROBLEM IN PHILOLOGY.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XLIV, Issue 14007, 11 March 1920, Page 1

A NEW PROBLEM IN PHILOLOGY.

One of the odd by-products of the world war was an English-Kurdish vocabulary arranged for the. troops who fought in the Near East, and one of the strange results of its compilation was the opening up of a new problem for the philologist. While the American soldier over his ••Easy Steps to French," the British Tommy was being drilled in polite conversations in the tongue used by the two or three million Kurds i of Persia :iiiti Asiatic Turkcv. As early as 191-5. the War Office a-ked Professor M'ingnna, of 3lanehester, to draw up a practical Eng-lish-Kurdish vocabulary tor the troops. The professor was surprised to discover,- as the work went on. that there was a greater affinity between many every-day words in English and Kurdish, or Pcrsp-Kurdish, than existed between English and French. The Kurds, il should be remembered, are a clan of the Persian family. They are a predatory people whose neight)ors have usually looked on them as a pe.-t. and they have at all times retained their independence in spite of the invasion ef Parthian, Sassanian-, Ifomau. Arab and Turk. They have no literature, and their speech is one of the primitive tongues of the IncloEuropean group. English, as we know, belongs to this same family of languages, and is closely affiliated to the older Teutonic dialects. Most of the abstract terms in English can be traced back to Latin or Greek, whereas most of our common, •-■very-day concrete, words are of Teutonic origin and it # is these common words that best establish kinship between What, therefore, was' Professor 3Smgana's surprise on discovering that ja' host of such words in English and in Kurdish are almost identical. To choose a few as example's: •■bad" is bad: "egg" is hckk; •'band" is baud; "be" isbe; "better'-' is potter, "bullock" is bullnck; "coal" is ehal: "chicken" is cliucka : "cough" is c.-ikh: "dark" is trrk: "owl'' is ail: "run" is rawin; "thunder" is dimder. That there is more than coincidence in this is obvious, and Rr." Mingnna recommends his discovery to philologists.