Middle East

Monday, November 23, 2009

Kurdish people 庫德人

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurd, http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/库尔德人

The Kurds (Kurdish: کورد / Kurd) are an Ethnic-Iranian ethnolinguistic group mostly inhabiting a region known as Kurdistan, which includes adjacent parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Substantial Kurdish communities also exist in the cities of western Turkey, and they can also be found in Armenia, Georgia, Israel, Azerbaijan, Russia, Lebanon and, in recent decades, some European countries and the United States (seeKurdish diaspora). Most speak Kurdish, an Indo-European language of the Iranian branch.

Kurdish language (Kurdish: Kurdî or کوردی) is a term used for several Iranian languages spoken by Kurds. It is mainly concentrated in parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.^[16]

^{Kurmanji in Turkey; Sorani in northern Iraq, several sub-dialects:}

^{"Kurdish" is not a firm and standardized linguistic entity with the status of an official or state language. Kurdish is a continuum of closely related dialects that are spoken in a large geographic area spanning several national states, in some of these states forming one, or several, regional substandards.}

Most Kurds are bilingual or polylingual, speaking the languages of the surrounding peoples such as Arabic, Turkish and Persian as a second language. Kurdish Jews and some Kurdish Christians (not be confused with ethnic Assyrians of Kurdistan) usually speak Aramaic (for example:Lishana Deni) as their first language. Aramaic is a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic rather than Kurdish.

庫德人是一個生活於中東地區的遊牧民族，主分佈區位於土耳其、敘利亞、伊拉克、伊朗的交界地帶庫德斯坦，有少數分佈在亞塞拜然和亞美尼亞山區，在中東是人口僅次於阿拉伯、突厥和波斯民族的第四大民族。庫德人是中東地區最古老的民族之一，相傳是古代米底亞人的後代，兩千多年來一直都在庫德斯坦的山區活動，過去都過著遊牧式生活.

Kurd' had a socio-economic rather than ethnic meaning. It was used of nomads on the western edge of the Iranian plateau and probably also of the tribes that acknowledged the Sassanians in Mesopotamia, many of which must have been Semitic in origin."^[26]

However the contemporary authors who take this term as an "ethnic group" have suggested the Medes^[27],Cyrtians^[28] and Carduchi^[29] as possible ancestors of the "Kurds". Most Kurds consider themselve among the descendents of Medes.^[21]

庫德人大多數都是伊斯蘭教信徒，屬於遜尼派，講庫德語。庫德語有兩種書寫方式：在伊拉克和伊朗主要用阿拉伯字母書寫，在土耳其和敘利亞主要用拉丁字母。雖然兩種書寫方式其實相通，但可能因為長久的分隔，使兩種語言在用詞方面已開始有顯著不同。

庫德族獨立建國的聲浪，屢屢遭受土耳其、伊拉克等國的壓迫。

阿拉伯

Arab people (Arabic: عربي‎, ʿarabi) or Arabs (العرب al-ʿarab) are an ethnic group whose members identify along linguistic, culturalor genealogical grounds.^[11] Arabs are a Semitic-speaking people originating in Arabia, but today spread across most of Western Asia and North Africa, and many other parts of the world.^[12]

The Arab World (Arabic: العالم العربي‎, al-ʻālam al-ʻarabi) refers to Arabic-speaking countries stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to theArabian Sea in the east, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the north to the Horn of Africa and the Indian Ocean in the southeast. It consists of 25 countries and territories with a combined population of 325 million people straddling North Africa and Western Asia.

The Arabic language became the lingua franca of the wider Mediterranean region with the rise of Islam in the 7th century CE as the language of the Qur'an, and Arabic language and culture were widely disseminated as a result of early Islamic expansion.^[13]

Though the Arabic language is older, Arabic culture was first spread in Western Asia beginning in the 2nd century as culturallyArab Christians such as the Ghassanids, Lakhmids and Banu Judham began migrating north from Arabia into the Syrian Desertand the Levant.^[14]^[15]

在蒙昧時代，只有阿拉比亞的游牧民族貝都因人被稱為阿拉伯人。

大擴張之後倭馬亞王朝建立，只有源出阿拉伯半島、血統純正的人才有資格自稱阿拉伯人，擁有高貴的身份；

而到了阿拔斯王朝，文明的融合進一步加強。阿拉伯人這個概念，逐漸包括了帝國屬下所有使用阿拉伯語、信仰伊斯蘭的各族人民。以上是簡便的說法，民族的鬥爭與融合要複雜的多。很多人可以承受異族的統治，甚至皈依他們的宗教（一個重要的原因是為了避稅），但他們一直沒有放棄自己的語言。直到阿拔斯王朝的末期，阿拉伯語才成為整個帝國的「普通話」。

和猶太人一樣，同屬閃族的分支。根據伊斯蘭傳統的說法，阿拉伯人的祖先是以實瑪利(易斯馬儀)，而以實瑪利則是以撒(易斯哈格)的同父異母兄弟，是亞伯拉罕(易卜拉欣)的長子。因此，猶太人和阿拉伯人同是兄弟，這一對兄弟的紛爭已經有一千四百餘年了。

阿拉伯人口數量眾多，且與猶太人的紛爭不斷。