Kurdish spoken texts recorded by David MacKenzie in the mid-1950's in Iraqi Kurdistan, prepared and deposited by Geoffrey Haig

David Neil MacKenzie (1926‒2001) was a British-born philologist who was professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Göttingen from 1975 to his retirement in 1994. In 1961‒1962, he published a two-volume documentation of different dialects of Kurdish (MacKenzie, David. Kurdish dialect studies, Vol. I‒II. 1961 & 1962, Oxford University Press, abbreviated here as KDS). It was based on extensive field work in Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1950's, and includes a substantial corpus of transcribed and translated recordings, published as volume II of KDS (1962). After MacKenzie’s death, a few of the original recordings (magnetic tapes) were discovered and subsequently digitalized by Geoffrey Haig at the Phonetics Laboratory of the University of Kiel, creating a series of mono WAV-files (sampling rate 44100, 16 Bit resolution). They are made available here in both WAV and MP3 formats by Geoffrey Haig with the assistance of N. Schiborr.

Content

The tapes contain mostly folkloric and oral history, with some scattered poetry and a word list, primarily of Central Kurdish (CK), also known as Sorani, and some Northern Kurdish, Badinî dialect. The sound quality is somewhat uneven and not sufficient for finer-grained investigations of phonology, but the content is still readily recoverable. Most of the recordings correspond to (some part of) the transcribed and translated texts published in KDS II (1962). A summary of the tapes and the corresponding files, with some comments, is given in the included documentation PDF.

Archive structure

The archive contains:

• 17 sound files each in two versions, WAV and MP3
• a PDF with descriptions of the recordings, including a tabular list of files and tapes
• a PDF of MacKenzie, David (1962). Kurdish dialect studies, Vol. II. Oxford University Press.