An article in Reuters this morning about Turkey not letting US ground troops onto Turkish soil for an invasion of noethern Iraq, lead me searching for the etymology of the Kurdish word peshmerga "Kurdish freedom fighter". Googling for "peshmerga etymology" revealed a single article from four years back called "Science and Technological Glossary: An Issue Facing Technical Writing in Kurdish." [Peshmerga means literally 'those who face death' kind of like the Latin moritori.]
Kurdish is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Iranian group, related to Farsi and Baluchi. Anyway, the mind boggles, we've given "permission" to the Turkish army to set up a buffer zone in northern Iraq which is inhabited by Kurds. The Kurds and the Turks do not get along with one another. They relations are almost as poor as the Armenians and the Turks. These are the same Kurds which the elder Bush promised to help fight the Iraqis in 1991 and later reneged on.
All in all, a difficult matter in a difficult time.
Posted by jim at March 19, 2003 09:14 AM