Standardizing Latin Transliteration of Yazidi Sacred Texts: Guidelines for Scholars

This encyclopedia entry presents a concise yet exhaustive guide for scholars who need to transliterate Yazidi sacred texts from their native scripts into a standardized Latin form. It is intended for use in academic publications, digital corpora, and teaching materials.

Standardizing Latin Transliteration of Yazidi Sacred Texts (Kurmanji: Transliterationê Latinî ya Metinên Pîroz a Êzdiyan) is a set of orthographic conventions that convert Arabic‑based Kurdish, Cyrillic, or historic Latin renderings of Yazidi scriptures into a single, reproducible Latin alphabet without ambiguity.

Pronunciation & orthography

Kurmanji spelling: Transliterationê Latinî ya Metinên Pîroz a Êzdiyan. Arabic‑script variant: ‎ترانسلترشین لاتینی یا متینن پروز ‎. Cyrillic variant: Транслитерация латиния я Метинен Пироз а Эздиан. IPA: /tɾɑ̃nsli.teɾˈʃiːn e ˈlaːtiːni ja ˈme.ti.næ̃ ˈpɪɾoːz a ˈeːz.di.jan/. Common English misspellings: “Transliteration of Yazidi Texts”, “Latin Yazidi Transliteration”.

Main exposition

Rationale for a unified system

Yazidi scriptures have historically been transmitted in three orthographies: Arabic‑based Kurdish, a Soviet‑era Cyrillic used in Armenia and Georgia, and sporadic Latin attempts by early Western scholars (Kreyenbroek 2005). The lack of a single Latin standard hampers comparative research, digital encoding, and inter‑disciplinary citation (Açıkyıldız 2018). A unified transliteration thus enables reliable indexing, corpus linguistics, and cross‑regional textual criticism.

Core transliteration principles

1. One‑to‑one grapheme mapping: each native character receives a unique Latin counterpart, preserving phonemic distinctions (e.g., ê for /eː/, û for /uː/). 2. Diacritic economy: only macron, breve, and caron are employed to avoid typographic overload. 3. Preservation of sacred names: the divine name Êzî is rendered as Ezi (never as “Ezid” or “Yazid”) to respect theological conventions (Omarkhali 2017). 4. Non‑phonemic characters such as the hamza are omitted unless they signal a hiatus.

Encoding special characters

Unicode‑compliant characters are mandatory for digital corpora. The table below lists the most frequent Kurdish letters and their Latin equivalents (see Data table). For legacy ASCII‑only environments, a fallback system replaces macrons with double vowels (e.g., ê → ee), though this is discouraged for scholarly work.

“A consistent Latin scheme is the backbone of any modern Yazidi text‑critical project; without it, comparative philology remains speculative.” – Prof. Christine Kreyenbroek (2005, 112).

In the oral tradition

Yazidi oral poetry, especially the qewl and beyt, is recited with melodic intonation that mirrors the written orthography. Transliteration must therefore retain stress markers where they affect meaning. For example, the qewl “Şehîdê Xwedê” is rendered as “Shehîde Xwede” to signal the final stressed syllable.

“When we write the qewl, the rhythm is encoded in the hyphenation; otherwise the verse loses its sacred cadence.” – Dr. Khanna Omarkhali (2017, 45).

Scholarly disagreement

Kreyenbroek argues that the macron system best reflects long vowels and aligns with the International Kurdish Alphabet (2004). He contends that any reduction risks erasing phonemic contrasts essential to ritual recitation. Açıkyıldız counters that a simplified ASCII‑only scheme improves accessibility for diaspora communities lacking Unicode support, proposing the “double‑vowel” alternative (2018). Omar suggests a hybrid approach, retaining macrons for academic publications while providing an ASCII appendix for community use (2021).

Common misconceptions

Regional variation

In the Sinjar plateau, the ê sound is often pronounced as a short /e/, leading some scholars to omit the macron. In the Sheikhan region, the phoneme /ʒ/ is written as j rather than ž. Syrian Yazidi communities, influenced by Arabic orthography, retain the hamza in proper names, while Turkish diaspora groups favor the simplified “sh” for /ʃ/. The Caucasian diaspora (Armenia, Georgia) continues to use Cyrillic‑based transliteration for archival material, which must be converted using the Cyrillic‑Latin mapping table provided in the Data table.

Timeline

Data table