They themselves are fond, like one or two other of the southern tribes, of asserting that they originated near Shiraz, and are southern Persians.
There is no particular reason to believe that they are other than Kurds, of the Kurdish race, mixed certainly with Lur blood, but of no other origin than the race among whom they are reckoned.
So much information has been collected about the tribe, that it is redundant to detail any here. From its situation along the Bagdad-Kermanshah road, the intercourse its chiefs have with Persia, and the fact that it is Shi’a by religion, the Kalhur is probably the most accessible of all the tribes of Kurdistan, and by no means the most interesting, either from the point of view of language, customs, or history.
As to the Kurdish language, so little is known of it that it has been described as a corrupt dialect of Persian and Arabic, “a kind of dog-Persian,” and “a degraded old Persian dialect.”
It is none of these.
Probably the Persian of to-day, beautiful language as it is, and perfect—the most euphonious and complete of all the Aryan tongues—cannot show such manifest signs of antiquity as does Kurdish. For there is a Kurdish language, a complete tongue, having rich grammatical forms, distinct syntax, and a total freedom from those Arabic importations which have, while enriching Persian, thrown into abeyance the old words of pure Aryan origin which were formerly used.
Ranging side by side the many dialects of Kurdistan, which differ in pronunciation and form so much as to be practically different languages, we find that one among them shows a regularity of form, a perfectly developed grammatical scheme, with a conciseness and clarity of construction and pronunciation.
This is the Mukri language, spoken in Lahijan of Persia, south of Lake Urumia, and at Sauch Bulaq, a little town in the mountains, capital of the Mukri tribe.
This is not the place for an excursion into investigations of the similarity of Kurdish roots to those of the Zendavesta; it is sufficient to say that the Mukri people, living where Zoroaster commenced his teaching, and where was possibly his native place, and speaking the language most nearly approaching the archaic form, have some good claim to be considered the preservers of one of the best specimens of a pure Aryan tongue extant.
Investigation of the Kurdish language generally shows it to be a pure language which has suffered only from the erosion of form and corruption of pronunciation inevitable in a language not “fixed” by possessing a generally used literature.