Balochi Language and literature

This is a compilation of all the translations I have ever done for Coke Studio, and covers Seasons 2-10 & 12. Over the course of 10 seasons of the popular music programme, I had the opportunity to translate over 200 songs in 15 languages (Siraiki, Sindhi, Pashto, Punjabi, Brahui, Balochi, Braj Bhasha, Marwari, Bengali, Urdu, Persian, Kashmiri, Burushaski, Arabic, and Turkish), with the generous aid and advice of native speakers and academic experts.

Koroshi is the Balochi dialect spoken by the Korosh (Koroš), a group associated with the Qashqa’i tribes of Fārs in southwestern Iran. Entirely isolated from the main body of the Baloch habitat, Koroshi distinguishes itself in grammar and lexicon among Balochi varieties. The phonology of Koroshi demonstrates a solid Balochi pedigree but not without major mu-tations. Likewise, the nominal case-number system of Koroshi shows significant deviation from most other Balochi dialects. In verb morphosyntax a salient peculiarity is the coexist-ence of two parallel systems of the imperfective, which appear to be stabilizing in an evolu-tionary process of Koroshi aspect system. Borrowing from the neighboring languages is salient in the lexical domain, where Persian, the Fārs dialects, and Qashqa’i Turkish each play a part as the source language. Given all these peculiarities the degree of mutual intelli¬gibility between Koroshi and other Balochi dialects is yet to be established.

Forty long years had passed since an agitation was initiated for a ban on screening the first ever Balochi film and, since then, not a single Balochi production has managed to make it to the silver screen.
http://ziaurrehman.net/2016/09/03/a-new-lease-of-life-for-balochi-cinema/

The main objective of this research study is to identify certain socio-cultural values, norms and traditions particularly sports that have been played in the Baloch society and now these sports (games) are almost near to extinction. The researcher identified a Balochi game " Jee " that has been played by Baloch people in different parts of Balochistan and this game is now not almost as popular as it has been in the past. History of the sports can be traced back to the origin of the human being on the earth. The sports involve human being to hold their command of nature and environment. It is not possible to understand a particular society without knowing its cultural, social and economic history. For example, one cannot recognize the importance of rugby union in Wales without knowing their social, cultural and economic history. The Baloches who are living in their homeland (Balochistan) divided in three countries i.e. Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan and there are about five to eight million Baloch people living throughout the world. The Baloches like other nations of the world assert that they have their own national characteristics in all fields of life like traditions, social norms, traditions, art and music.

The speakers of any language, even if at a small extent, concur to change the lexicon, which they have inherited as a whole. They are driven to do that by the necessity of naming something new or optimizing the onomasio-logical salience of already existing words, with a continuous changing in the way they express concepts. In order to avoid an overloading of the memory system, they are encouraged to recycle what is already existent in the lexicon. Through a small set of associative strategies, people relate a concept which has already been verbalized, with another one which has to be verbalized, producing lexical changes. Over time, however, the conceptual motivation which originated a particular designation becomes obscure to speakers. Large scale lexical surveys aid us in discovering recurrent schemas of designating a concept and recovering the relevant motivation for each designation, i.e. its 'iconym' (the Engl. term iconym has been currently utilized, e.g., by Joachim Grzega in his contributions to Onomasiology Online). In the general framework of cognitive onomasiology, I have been carrying out since the 1990s (at L'Orientale University, Naples) a project aimed at singling out the different 'pathways' through which natural physical concepts have been designated in the Iranian languages, in order to get insight into the way Iranian speaking peoples have perceived and conceptualized the physical environment which they concurred to change with their millenary activities. There are several types of associative relations on which lexical innovation relies on; one of these is similarity. The best known process based on similarity is that of metaphor, a process through which we speak of a concept in terms of another, and whose main lines are similarity of shape, similarity of spatial configuration , functional similarity, etc. Since human beings perceive their bodies as an interface between themselves and the surrounding world, the body part lexicon overlaps in many points with those of other conceptual domains; first of all, with the lexicon used to describe the environment.

Human beings used the language as a tool of communication for thousands of years, but the language came in written form during the Sumerian and Akkadian periods. Balochi is a Northwestern Iranian language, but it has a huge word similarity to Akkadian language. Many of the scholars opine, that the Baloch are from the Sumerian and Akkadian origin or stock and their language shares a huge similarity to the said languages, but others oppose this conception. This paper finds out the history of word similarities of Akkadian and Balochi in an etymological and historical base to show the ancient linguistic relations with the Akkads.

1. La regione che forma il cuore dell'area iranica è costituita da un altopiano a elevazione media di circa mille metri sul livello del mare, chiuso ad ovest dalla catena montuosa degli Zagros, che procede dal Caucaso lungo la Mesopotamia fino quasi a costeggiare il Golfo Persico. I monti dell'Elborz separano l'altopiano dalla depressione del Caspio; verso est le uniche elevazioni notevoli sono costituite dai monti del Khorasān 1 , non molto elevati e da sempre facile accesso per le rotte migratorie provenienti dalle steppe dell'Asia centrale. Proseguendo ad est, la catena dello Hindukush forma una dorsale montuosa in direzione ovest-est che attraversa tutto l'Afghanistan e termina nel Pamir. Le pendici settentrionali dello Hindukush digradano verso le steppe dell'Asia centrale, quelle meridionali verso le pianure desertiche del Balocˇistān, del Sistān e del Makrān. Al di fuori dell'area montana, l'altopiano è caratterizzato da vaste aree desertiche, semidesertiche o steppose, interrotte da oasi nelle quali sorgono le grandi città (nelle regioni centrali) e i villaggi fortificati della regione nord-orientale, costruiti in epoche successive a difesa dalle invasioni nomadiche provenienti dall'Asia centrale.

Beluçlar, tarihçilerin önemli bir kısmı tarafından bir Kürt kavmi olarak kabul
edilmektedir. Hint-İran dil grubunun bir dalı olan Beluçça Farsça ve Peştucayla
benzerlikler göstermektedir. Beluçça ilk eserler Sanskritçe döneminde verilmiştir.
644’te Makran’ın Emevî topraklarına katılmasıyla Beluç dili ve edebiyatında köklü
bir değişim yaşanmıştır. Beluçistan, Kuşanlar, Gazneliler gibi Hindistan’da kurulan
Türk devletlerinin zaman zaman bir parçası olmuştur. Orta Asya’dan gelen Türk
göçmen ve akıncıları da Beluçistan’ın kimi bölgelerine yerleşmişlerdir. Yüzlerce
yıl yerli Beluçça konuşan halkla dışarıdan gelen Türkler arasında idarî, ictimaî ve
lisanî etkileşim yaşanmıştır. Bu etkileşim neticesinde kimi Türkçe kelime ve
unsurlar Beluç diline ödünçlenmiştir. Çalışmamızda üç Beluçça sözlük Türkçe
kelime ve unsurlar açısından taranmıştır. Taramalarımız sonucunda 51 öğe tespit
edilmiştir. Bu unsurlar tematik, morfolojik ve fonetik tasnife tabi tutulmuştur.
Beluççada tespit edilen unsurların Türkçe mukabilleri beş farklı etimoloji sözlüğü
olmak üzere 18 farklı sözlükte taranarak ödünçleme listesine dahil edilmiştir.

A vast surface east of Karmania (Central – Eastern Iran) and south of Arachosia (South Afghanistan) stretches from the straits of Ormuz to the Delta of Indus (the area of today’ Karachi); this is Gedrosia, the present day Baluchistan.

Alexander the Great of Macedonia lost most of his army in the desert and the swamps of Gedrosia. And the modern nation of the Baluch lost their freedom, independence, progress, development and even unity, as they have been divided between Iran and Pakistan.

The overall surface of Baluchistan totals ca. 550000 km2 (as large as France), and there are about 13 million Baluch in the world. The great majority lives in Pakistan (9.5 million people), and the capital of the Pakistani Baluchistan is Quetta. In the Iranian part of Baluchistan live ca. 2.5 million people, with Zahedan for capital. A small part of Baluchistan is included in the southern territory of Afghanistan.

Baluchistan reflects some of Asia’s bleakest pages of oppression and tyranny. For centuries the Baluch were part of the Iranian Empire, at a time the concept of ‘nation’ did not exist in the way we use it today. With the division of the area between the colonial British and the nationalist monarchical regime of Iran, the Baluch found their land divided by otherwise incomprehensible borders. A long story of humiliations, persecutions and cultural discriminations started; quite unfortunately, it has not ended yet.
First published in AfroArticles, American Chronicle, and Buzzle on 19th March 2008
Republished in January 2011 here:
http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2011/01/gedrosia-of-past-times-todays.html

Usually, the poetry of Chákarian period is considered to be the classical poetry of the Balochi literature. This is the golden age of Balochi oral literature which elaborates the real essence of the Baloch culture, tribal set up, solidarity and integrity of the Baloch sub-tribes, modus operundi of waging war to the opponent nations.

A vast surface in the east of Karmania (Central – Eastern Iran) and in the south of Arachosia (South Afghanistan) stretches from the straits of Ormuz to the Delta of Indus (the area of today’ Karachi); this is Gedrosia, the present day Baluchistan.

Alexander the Great of Macedonia lost most of his army in the desert and the swamps of Gedrosia. And the modern nation of the Baluchis lost their freedom, independence, progress, development and even unity, as they have been divided between Iran and Pakistan.
First published in AfroArticles, American Chronicle, and Buzzle on 19th March 2008
Quoted on 5th December 2008 here:
http://www.phrasebase.com/archive2/baluchi/gedrosia-of-past-times-todayandacircs-tyrannized-baluchistan.html

The Korosh people are scattered across large areas of southern Iran, from Hormozgan all the way to Khuzestan, and onto the Iranian plateau.This group, which numbers over 10,000 people, is found in significant concentrations near Bandar Abbas in Hormozgan Province, in north-western Fars Province around Shiraz, and across the southern part of Fars Province. Although oral accounts situate the provenance of the Korosh in Balochistan, and their language is closely related to southern varieties of Balochi, they have a distinct identity. Some affirm a historical and ethnic connection to the Baloch, but others view themselves as an autonomous tribe; in north-western Fars Province, members of the group maintain an affiliation with the larger Qasqā’i tribal confederacy.The present work contributes to the study of the Korosh through the lens of their language, Koroshi. The corpus for this study has been gathered among speakers of the dialect of Koroshi spoken around Shiraz. The book opens with...

The aim of the present article is to describe the morphosyntactic properties of Iranian Coastal Balochi as spoken by the Afro-Balochi community. The Afro-Baloch have completely switched to Balochi and there are no traces of African languages in their speech. In comparison with other Balochi dialects of Iran on the one hand and Coastal Balochi dialects of Pakistan on the other, Coastal Balochi as spoken in Iran shows archaic characteristics, particularly in its case system, in the demonstrative pronouns and in the alignment features. This particularly applies to the speech of the Afro-Baloch, who due to persisting social segregation have limited access to education and media.

The aim of the present paper is to describe the morphosyntactic properties of Iranian Coastal Balochi as spoken by the Afro-Balochi community. The Afro-Baloch have completely switched to Balochi and there are no traces of African languages in their speech. In comparison with other Balochi dialects of Iran on the one hand and Coastal Balochi dialects of Pakistan on other, Coastal Balochi as spoken in Iran shows archaic characteristics, particularly in its case system, in the demonstrative pronouns and in the alignment features. This particularly applies to the speech of the Afro-Baloch, who due to persisting social segregation have limited access to education and media.

This paper is an attempt to discuss the role of orientalists in the promotion of Balochi language and literarture. How did the orientalists come to Asia, in particular, to Balochistan and what were their intentions behind coming to Balochistan and the regions around Balochistan. This paper discusses the the aims and objectives of the orientalists regarding Balochistan, who visited the region as businessmen, traders, geologists and linguists. They inloved with the local population studied them and made plans regarding them. In this regard they did much for Balochi language and literature such as the collections of Balochi classical poerty and the works on Balochi language and its grammar.

Formation of new terminologies (neologism) and lexemes has been an issue of all languages of the world during the process of evolution. The Balochi language from the beginning as written language has been confronting such a noticeable issue too. From 1950 till date, terminology and lexeme formation has been carried out by the Baloch linguists as well as the literary men to enrich the literary language of Balochi. This paper focuses the formation of new terminologies in different eras, neologization of literary and linguistic terms and re-structurization of neologized terminologies from time to time.