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My hunter-gatherer & farmer breakdown with qpAdm by @sapphiregnm
30.8% Zagros Neolithic Farmer
32.4% Anatolian Neolithic Farmer
15.5% EHG
10.8% CHG
6.5% Natufian
4% East Asian
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Important update and worth mentioning that a large part of Iranic R1a is actually not under Z93 and Z94, but under R1a-YP4141 and R1a-Z283>Y17491.
New sample under R1a-YP4141!
In what can only be described as a class of its own, we have provided a sample to YFULL with 96x read depth, making it the most in-depth sequenced individual Iranian-speaker that we are aware of.
The individual in question is a Baluch from Zahedan, and he can be found on the unopened branch of R1a-YP5049. What this means is that while he certainly is not basal, no other sample on the tree matches him sufficiently enough to form an unique subclade under YP5049. This implies that, with a more robust sampling strategy, we will have a better understanding of the clade diversity.
The link to the clade can be found below:
yfull.com/tree/R-YP5049/
eylok retweeted
The following image is my tree of the Iranian language family, based on descent alone. Terms like “North West Iranian” and “East Iranian” are not genetic terms, and they don’t map properly onto areal contact zones either. A great deal of research is still needed to refine how the Iranian languages descend (some more than others). A big problem at the moment is that linguists often contradict each other on how some of these branches should be classified, because the traditional groupings rest on a handful of features, assumptions, etc that newer data no longer support.
Glottolog is one attempt to bring the classifications of various linguists together. The problem is that it combines placements that contradict each other. For example, it places North Western Iranian under Agnes Korn’s Central Iranian node, yet Korn (2016), in the same paper that proposes Central Iranian, argues that the North Western node should be deleted from the tree. Central Iranian is also not well established enough to be asserted as fact: Korn herself presents it as a preliminary sketch. Glottolog’s tree also gives no indication of roughly when these splits are supposed to have happened.
The position of Proto Iranian itself might need to be revised. Persian, the ś branch (Khotanese Tumshuqese and Wakhi) and Nuristani, which Halfmann (2025) now places within Iranian, all split off before Proto sp, so their separate histories go back an unknown length of time before 1500 BCE. Nonetheless, until further investigation I have kept Proto Iranian where it is, with the changes that could define it listed beside it. If that node fails in the future, several more Indo Iranian branches would need to be opened up, and the deepest node we could still support would be the one I have called Proto sp.
I have relabelled some branches. For example, Khotanese Tumshuqese is usually called “Saka”, a name that ties it to the Scythians. But the little evidence we have for Scythian proper puts the two on different branches: Scythian has sp (Akkadian Išpakāya, c. 675 BCE, from *spaka ‘dog’), while Khotanese has ś (aśśa ‘horse’). In other cases I have kept the names, like the “Pamir” branch, but limited it to Shughni Roshani, Sarikoli and Yazghulami, a grouping that goes back to Sokolova (1967). The other so called Pamir languages are placed elsewhere.
What I have listed as Proto sp needs the most attention in future. The exact path by which those languages diversified could involve some regroupings, and some of them have had little to no attention in academia. One possible regrouping is whether Ossetian forms a closer branch with Sogdian, as Novák (2014) and Glottolog both propose.
Expand the image, and open it in a new tab for a higher resolution.
Nothing can beat the natural charm of ancient architecture. This is 100 times more beautiful to me.
Photos taken by me recently in Mardin. ☀️
Hingiv in Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) and hengiwîn in Central Kurdish (Sorani), apparently derived from Proto-Iranian *hangubáynah.
Even though it sounds similar to the Germanic terms for honey, there seems to be no shared etymological root. However the *báynah in Proto-Iranian meaning bee shares the same etymological root as the English word bee (from Proto-IE *bʰey-).
Most people are really bad at classifying phenotypes I’ve noticed. Inönü doesn’t look Zagrosian at all, he looks Armenoid.
Diyar Dersim and Hozan Comerd look very Zagrosian/Iranid. I’d recognize from 100 km that they are Kurds. Both Kurmanjis from Dersim btw.
Yezidis would turn into Kurdish nationalists overnight if this happened. We’d witness another Assyrian-Mede war and the second Fall of Nineveh in modern times.
According to this, Western Kurmanji spoken in regions west of the Euphrates is closer to medieval Kurdish than Standard Kurmanji, which is based on the Botani dialect.
Massive drop, make sure to read this post ⬇️
MAJOR development. After several years of on and off attempts, I have finally solved the etymology of the ethnonym Kurd, which currently has no solution in academia. It comes from Proto-Indo-European *kr̥t-í- “cut” → Proto-Indo-Iranian *kr̥ti- → Proto-Iranian *kr̥ti- → *kur(ə)ti- (“cut”, but also an outer “garment”) → *Kurt(i)- (adopted as a tribal name) → *Kurt → *Kurd (by the 3rd c. CE) → Kurd (from a tribal identity to an ethnonym).
The first image, an etymological tree, sets out and justifies each sound change, if you want to see how the derivation is linguistically proven. It also contains the historical details on each form where attested. X reduces image resolution, so to read it clearly, expand the image and open it in a new tab. The second image shows the garment in question: the thick, tent-like traditional shepherd’s cloak made of dense felted wool, or wool mixed with goat hair.
Specifically, the name Kurd comes from this outer-garment sense, which was later adopted as a tribal name. Among Iranian languages, the garment word first appears in Avestan as kərəti-, in instructions on how Zoroastrians should wear it together with the sacred shirt and belt. In Parthian, kórt-ēn was the garment boys received as a coming-of-age gift when they reached manhood (which is linguistically a close match to the word Kurd, as the stem's predicted outcome of the Parthian would eventually become Kórd/Kurd since that gloss predates t > d). The word has cognates across the Iranian world, living and extinct, such as Khotanese, Ossetian, Sogdian and Bactrian.
There is historical evidence that Kurd still carried a secondary garment meaning in the early Islamic period, as the word was borrowed into Classical Arabic for a type of garment: kurdī, from the narrator Ibn Abī al-Zinād (d. 790 CE in Baghdad), in Abū Dāwūd 915 (before 889 CE), and kurdiyya in Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1148 CE), among others. The hadith reads: “…from ʿĀʾisha, with this report. He said: and he took a kurdī that belonged to Abū Jahm. It was said: O Messenger of God, the khamīṣa was better than the kurdī.” This is important because it shows the t > d form unlike Kurt-(ek), and other forms that passed through west Iranian languages later on via Sogdian. They are still from the same root however.
Tribal names and clans very often come from places, animals, objects and so on. The Kurdish tribe Sanjabi is named after the squirrel fur, Herki is named after a citadel, etc. Kurds are first attested in history specifically as a tribe by Eratosthenes, Strabo and others. The older reading of Kurd as “nomad” has no etymological basis in any Iranian language, and many Kurdologists/Iranologists today regard it as an anti-Kurdish narrative with no basis in the historical record (see Boris James). Some earlier academics unknowingly built on Arabic mistranslations and deliberate misreadings, which are now corrected. There were also at least 11 Iranian nomadic tribal organisations on the plateau before Islam with no Kurdish identification, and 5 Iranian tribal organisations on the plateau that never had a Kurdish tribal affiliation which completely contradicts this narrative.
The main sound-change question left open in my tree is how r̥ became ur, since it normally gives ar or ər. There are several resolutions, but it is not yet clear which one it is. The u-form *kur(ə)ti- may have spread by borrowing, as a garment from the East Iranian lands: ur is the usual outcome in Parachi, Sanglechi-Ishkashmi and Shughni (Clayton 2022), and Sogdian kurθ- probably passed into Persian kurta. Or it may be a regular change in some western dialect, as in Balochi kurt “did” < *kr̥ta- (Korn 2003).
Several scholars already tie the garment word to the root for “cut”. Abaev derives Ossetian kærc “fur coat” from Old Ossetian *karti-, which “corresponds perfectly” to Avestan kərəti- “garment” (that is, *kr̥ti-), perhaps from *(s)ker- “to cut”; he calls Ossetian kuræt a loan. Bailey derives Khotanese kīḍakyä “garment” from kart- “to cut, tailor”, comparing kərəti-. Henning took Sogdian kurθ- “garment” as the same word as kərəti-, and Benveniste linked Persian kurta to the Sogdian. Sims-Williams, publishing Bactrian kuratīg “shirt”, calls it “a word of unknown but probably non-Iranian origin”, which would leave room for a substrate source such as the BMAC (2007: 224). Although Sims-Williams did not gloss through the full extent of the Iranian forms, or look too deeply into it.
I have opted otherwise, and agree with the other scholars who do derive it through Iranian, because of the following reasons. Avestan kərəti-, Ossetian kærc and Khotanese kīḍ- show the regular outcomes of *kr̥ti- at opposite ends of the Iranian world. The root has an Indo-European etymology, *(s)ker-t- “cut”, shared with Vedic kṛtí- “dagger”, and the Pahlavi commentary renders kərəti- as kirrēnīdag “cut”. The forms Sims-Williams compares are the u-forms, and they can all be accounted for within Iranian. The Sogdian θ comes from the regular change ty > θy. Persian kurta, Arabic qurṭaq, Pashto kurta and Ossetian kuræt are loans. A word with a regular Iranian etymology doesn’t need a substrate source.
To clarify for anyone who doesn't know, the stem is important for derivation as it carries the evidence of descent, while the the suffixes don’t necessarily. A stem passes down through Iranian forms and goes through its regular sound changes, so kurt- with t, kurθ- with θ and kurd with d each show where a form sits on the tree. Suffixes are added afresh by each language and are often swapped or borrowed depending on the application and context.
Given this etymology, the identification of the Cyrtians with the Kurds is even stronger than it already was, as the forms are an exact match. Identifications with the Carduchi, Qardu, among other folk proposals have become even more improbable, both linguistically and historically, than they already were.
eylok retweeted
A preview of another forthcoming article of mine in the Journal of Indo-European Studies. The article re-examines the meaning of Avestan airiia- and investigates the geographical location of Airiianəm Vaējah, traditionally understood as the ‘Aryan homeland’. 1/10
A Kurd from Antep (@bilz_27, not even from mainland Kurdistan) has the same amount of early Iranian ancestry as this Iranian sample from Sassanian period.
I was literally in Diyarbakir yesterday. That‘s not Kurdish culture and these people are an absolute minority among Kurds and are being side-eyed by Kurds themselves. This is authentic Kurdish culture without any foreign influence:
