A Translation from Arabic to Fellihi and Kurdish Garshuni in the Eduard Sachau’s Collection (the One Hundred Sixty Second Story of Arabian Nights)

Abstract

According to Jeremias Schamir (1821-1906), Fellihi is an Eastern Syriac (Surat) dialect spoken by the people around Mosul and Ainkawa in Er- bil. Jeremias Schamir is a priest who lived in the Mosul area in the 19th century and is the scribal of many Garshuni (the names of foreign language texts written in the Syriac caligraphy) manuscripts. Schamir worked for the German orientalist Eduard Sachau (1845-1930) and copied many of the Fel- lihi, Arabic and Kurdish (Garshuni) manuscripts and sent them to Sachau. One of these manusc- ripts, the Sachau 200, is listed in the Collection of Orientalische Handschriften in the Berlin State Library-Prussian Cultural Heritage (Staatsbibliot- hek zu Berlin-Preußischer Kulturbesitz). This ma- nuscript includes a number of stories, tales, songs and epics along with an Arabic-Fellihi-Kurdish grammatical dictionary. In this work we will work on one of those stories, called Şebê Şêst û Dû-Ji Çîroka Hezar Şeb û Şebek, which has been transla- ted from Arabic into Fellihi and Kurdish. This ma- nuscript consists entirely of 66 leaves and the story in question is between leaf 29v and leaf 33r. With the introduction of this handbook, in this study our aforementioned story has been Latinized as well as updated in the language of today. In addition, this story was compared to Arabic and other mo- dern translations. As a result of this work, a trans- lation from a foreign language into Kurdish which was done in 1883, was published and shared with researchers.