I found my next language

On the way home from my daughter’s gymnastics club, we see a woman at the bus stop, talking on the phone and crying. "Why is she crying?" Maya asks.

There could be a million reasons for a person to cry but just as I’m about to say “I don’t know,” Maya answers her own question: "I know why. It’s because her family member has been kidnapped."

This is, apparently, the world we live in now, where having a kidnapped friend or family member is a very likely reason for someone to cry. Even a nine-year-old knows that.

It’s impossible to disconnect from this reality here, and when you do (on purpose, or by accident) you feel guilty.

A bench on my running route. The two posters say “Don’t ‘Happy Holiday’ me.” Because it’s the holiday season here now.

But living every day mired in fear, grief, and uncertainty is also not an option. It’s a quick way to go mad.

After spending an hour lying on the ground under Iranian missiles, I once again fell into the endless loop of news checking, both out of fear and out of hope, to hear something — anything — positive.

And there was something positive. A flicker of light at the end of a very dark tunnel. That week a 21-year-old Yezidi woman who had been kidnapped by ISIS in Iraq 10 years ago and sold to a Hamas-ISIS terrorist has been rescued in Gaza by the IDF and American forces.

The Yezidis were briefly in the spotlight when ISIS massacred thousands of Yezidis in 2014 and enslaved thousands of Yezidi women and children.

A couple of years later the West had declared that they defeated ISIS, and the still enslaved Yazidi women faded from the headlines.

I have been curious about the Yazidis ever since I first heard about them, and this piece of news last week and the video of that woman reconnecting with her family in Iraq, reignited my curiosity. Who are the Yazidis and what language do they speak?

I’ll tell you everything I’ve learned this past week. Please someone yell at me if I get some details wrong.

Who are the Yazidis?

Yazidis are a religious minority who are ethnically Kurds, a group indigenous¹ to Kurdistan, a geographical region that spans parts of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran.

Kurds have faced prosecution as an ethnic minority seeking autonomy in all these countries, throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The biggest massacres were the Dersim massacre in Turkey which killed 40,000 Kurdish civilians and the Anfal campaign in 1988 in Iraq which killed around 100,000 civilians.

In Iran, learning or teaching the Kurdish language can get you executed, and in Syria, Syrian-born Kurds are denied citizenship and therefore don’t have the right to vote, own property, or own a passport. They’re also not allowed to use their language.

It seems that Iraqi Kurdistan is the only place where Kurds have relative autonomy and where Kurdish is the official language along with Arabic. Northern Iraq was also the home of the largest Yezidi community before ISIS who considered them infidels, decimated it in 2014.

Unlike the majority of Kurds who are Muslim, Yazidis follow their own unique monotheistic religion, Yazidism, which has roots in Zoroastrianism (the ancient Iranian religion) and includes elements of Judaism and Islam.

Yazidis have the most amazing creation myth ever.

The Yazidi creation story (my retelling but with all the important facts preserved)

According to the Yazidis², God created the world from a white pearl, but then quickly got “disinterested in it” and “ceased direct involvement post-creation” (not my wording but I love it. Also I don’t blame him. Who would want to deal with our mess of a world??)

Instead, he created seven angels (one angel per day for the seven days of the week) and told them to do something with this crazy project he just started.

So each of the seven angels took it upon himself to create something. One created the sun, the other the moon, the third one the seas, and so on. The angel who created hell, fittingly, also created Adam and Eve (I imagine this bi-spectacled geek of an angel, who’s like, let’s just see what happens when we add humans… too engrossed in his geeky project to realize what the long-term impact of this decision.)

Adam was allowed to do whatever he wanted, except eat wheat. So when Adam did eat wheat anyway (of course) it didn’t only put him out of paradise but also caused a great deal of abdominal discomfort.

That’s when Tawûsî Melek, the main angel, came to the rescue. He created a bird that pecked an opening in Adam’s behind and Adam relieved himself and felt better.

Feeling better, Adam decided he was lonely, so one of the angels created Eve from his shoulder (or armpit, depending on which version you read). They started quarreling right away about who was to make the human race. To settle the argument they each decided to put their seed in a jar, seal it, and wait for nine months to see what came out. After nine months had passed, Adam’s jar had a boy and a girl in it, and Eve’s jar was full of worms and maggots (oh no). As the winner of the seed-and-jar competition, Adam was given nipples so he could nurse his children.³

Eve did have children in the end but only with Adam’s help. According to this story, the Yezidis descend from the two children that formed in Adam’s jar, while the rest of the human race originated from the children that Adam and Eve made together.

I don’t know about that. Most days I feel like we all descended from the worms and maggots in the third jar. (No no, we’re all wonderful creatures full of love and sunshine, you just have to move to a desert island without wi-fi for 20 to 30 years to realize this.)

I hope I don’t sound like I’m poking fun of the Yezidi creation myth. This is not my intention, especially since this story seems to have inspired both the gluten-free movement and the language activists who fight to replace the offensive word “woman” with the more inclusive “pregnant people” in every context.

Obviously, this is a very shallow and immature rendering of the Yazidi creation story and I’m sure there is a deeper meaning in there and in other Yazidi legends, but this is enough to get this one descendant of the worm jar re-excited about the world to want to learn another language.

I’m going to learn Kurdish.

What’s my why?

My original hope was to read the Yazidi creation story in the original but someone online pointed out that the language there might be too difficult for beginners. Besides I haven’t been able to find this story in original online anywhere.

So I’ll have to find another USSM goal.

My main why until then is to run away. Run away but not too far. Run away into another people’s tragic history by learning a little bit of their language.

Besides, if I don't turn my unease and my newly found fear of slamming doors into curiosity, I will spend my days alternating between checking the news and googling things like "How will I look bald?" (FYI — I look amazing.)

The Kurdish language

Kurdish is an Indo-European language that belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch. That means that it is still a (very distant) relative of English, Russian, and Spanish. Its closest relative is Persian (like a sister) and Hindi (like a first cousin.)

Kurdish itself has several dialects: Sorani (also called Central Kurdish), Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish), and Southern Kurdish. The different dialects of Kurdish aren’t mutually intelligible, so they’re more like distinct languages.

Kurmanji is the dialect spoken by the Yezidis, so this is the dialect I’m going to learn. It would have been easier to learn Sorani, which is the official dialect of the Iraqi Kurdistan., but we’re not looking for an easy life here. Even though Kurmanji is spoken by anywhere from 8 million to 20 million speakers, there aren’t many resources online. It’s not available on Duolingo, Google Translate, or other popular language apps. I’ll have to make do with a PDF of a reference grammar I found online.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

---

Friends with Words is the main thing I do this year. If you find these posts inspiring, entertaining, and educational, please consider buying me a virtual coffee. I would be so very grateful. And I’m so very grateful to those of you who have already done it or are doing it on a monthly basis 🙏 💜

1. "Indigenous" is one of those totally normal and even important words that I don't like anymore because it is so often weaponized.

2. You can read the full version of this story here, here, and here.

3. I’m seriously in awe of this story. It’s the only creation myth I know that neatly explains both the origins pooping and the purpose of man’s nipples.