Shamdinani Stories I - (Brill Kurdish Studies) by David N MacKenzie & Ergin Öpengin (Hardcover)

About the Book

During World War I in Urmia, Russian consul Basil Nikitin and Kurdish Mullah Sa'id of Shamdinan collaborated to document Kurdish language and culture. This volume presents 62 texts in English translation, with context, glossary, map, and indices, capturing Kurdish oral and literary history.

Book Synopsis

During World War I, in the city of Urmia, Iran, the Russian consul Basil Nikitin recruited the Kurdish Mullah Sa'id of Shamdinan to assist him in the study of the Kurdish language. Their collaboration produced a rich body of cultural and historical texts. This volume presents 62 Kurdish texts with parallel English translations, accompanied by an introduction that outlines the historical and literary context, a Kurdish-English glossary, a map of relevant locations, and indices of personal and place names. Concluding a century of Orientalist scholarship, the volume offers a vivid portrayal of Kurdish culture and oral tradition in a highly refined literary form.
Funded by the European Union (ERC, ALHOME, 101021183).

About the Author

David Neil MacKenzie (1926-2001) was a philologist of Iranian languages. He obtained his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London in 1957 and worked in the same university as a Lecturer of Kurdish and Iranian languages. In 1975 he was appointed as the chair of Oriental Philology at the University of Göttingen in Germany where he worked until his retirement in 1994. He was elected as a fellow of British Academy. MacKenzie published extensively on Middle Iranian languages as well as the Kurdish and Pashto. He is best known for his two volume Kurdish Dialect Studies (Oxford University Press, 1961, 1962) and Concise Pahlavi Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 1971). Ergin Öpengin is a research associate in the Middle Eastern Studies Department of the University of Cambridge. His research has focused on the structural and sociolinguistic aspects of Kurdish and Iranian languages. He is the author of The Mukri Variety of Central Kurdish: Grammar, Texts, and Lexicon (Reicher Verlag, 2016), a co-editor of Current Issues in Kurdish Linguistics (University of Bamberg Press, 2019) as well as serving as an associate editor to Kurdish Studies Journal.