Margaret Kahn | |
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Born | New York City, U.S. |
Pen name | Margy Kahn |
Occupation |
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Nationality | American |
Education | Barnard College University of Michigan (PhD) |
Website | |
pearlnotepress |
Margaret Kahn (pen name, Margy Kahn) is an internationally known American writer and linguist. She is the author of Children of the Jinn: In Search of the Kurds and Their Country , first published by Seaview Books in 1980 with a second updated edition issued in 2020. [1] [2] She is also the author of Borrowing and Variation in a Phonological Description of Kurdish. [3] She wrote the entry on Kurds in The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. [4] Her articles on phonetics and phonology have appeared in a number of academic journals, and her short stories have been published both in literary journals and popular magazines. Her plays have been produced at theaters in California and Maryland.
Born in New York City, Kahn went to Barnard College where she graduated cum laude with a major in linguistics and a minor in writing. Upon graduation she was offered an NDEA fellowship to the linguistics department at the University of Michigan where she took courses in Arabic as well as theoretical linguistics. She was among the first scholars to study gender differences in language. [5]
In graduate school in Ann Arbor, she studied articulatory phonetics with J.C. Catford. She also worked at one of the first women's crisis centers in the country. [6] After receiving a master's degree in linguistics, she went to Iran where she taught English as a second language at Rezaiyeh Agricultural College in the city now known as Urmia, and pursued field research on Kurdish. After receiving her Ph.D. in theoretical linguistics from the University of Michigan, she became a Research Affiliate in the speech communication group of the Research Lab of Electronics at MIT [7] where she helped author several papers on the phonetics of Persian and taught briefly at Boston and Tufts Universities. In 1978, she took a position as a lecturer in the Department of Acoustics at Alexandria University in Egypt where she taught Arabic phonetics.
In 1980, Kahn began working at Telesensory Systems in Palo Alto where she applied linguistic knowledge to improve the quality of text-to-speech for a product commissioned by the Canon Corporation. In 1981, she became a Member of Technical Staff at Hewlett Packard Labs. At HP, she continued to work on the quality of compressed speech as well as testing for speech recognition systems. She also consulted for Apple Computer on improving the quality of their text-to-speech. [8] [9] Later, she worked for Sensory Access Foundation in Palo Alto. Her paper on a side-by-side comparison of reading machines was presented at the 1994 Closing the Gap Conference in Minneapolis. In addition she consulted at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information where she helped organize the disability portion of the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, focusing on access to the graphical user interface for blind and low vision users. [10]
Kahn's short stories about interactions between Americans and people from the Middle East have appeared in a variety of magazines. Under the name “Margy Kahn” she has written a number of short plays and two longer plays which have had staged readings and full productions in California and in Maryland. [11]
Kurds or Kurdish people are an Iranic ethnic group native to the mountainous region of Kurdistan in Western Asia, which spans southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northern Syria. There are exclaves of Kurds in Central Anatolia, Khorasan, and the Caucasus, as well as significant Kurdish diaspora communities in the cities of western Turkey and Western Europe. The Kurdish population is estimated to be between 30 and 45 million.
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:
Kurdish is a language or a group of languages spoken by Kurds in the geo-cultural region of Kurdistan and the Kurdish diaspora. Kurdish languages constitutes a dialect continuum, many of which are not mutually intelligible, belonging to Western Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. The main three dialects or languages of Kurdish are Northern Kurdish, Central Kurdish, and Southern Kurdish.
Kurdistan, or Greater Kurdistan, is a roughly defined geo-cultural region in West Asia wherein the Kurds form a prominent majority population and the Kurdish culture, languages, and national identity have historically been based. Geographically, Kurdistan roughly encompasses the northwestern Zagros and the eastern Taurus mountain ranges.
Sorani Kurdish or Central Kurdish, also called Sorani (سۆرانی/Soranî), is a Kurdish dialect or a language that is spoken in Iraq, mainly in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan in western Iran. Sorani is one of the two official languages of Iraq, along with Arabic, and is in administrative documents simply referred to as "Kurdish".
The Kurds are an Iranian ethnic group in the Middle East. They have historically inhabited the mountainous areas to the south of Lake Van and Lake Urmia, a geographical area collectively referred to as Kurdistan. Most Kurds speak Northern Kurdish Kurmanji Kurdish (Kurmanji) and Central Kurdish (Sorani).
Kurmanji, also termed Northern Kurdish, is the northernmost of the Kurdish languages, spoken predominantly in southeast Turkey, northwest and northeast Iran, northern Iraq, northern Syria and the Caucasus and Khorasan regions. It is the most widely spoken form of Kurdish.
Janet Pierrehumbert is Professor of Language Modelling in the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. She developed an intonational model which includes a grammar of intonation patterns and an explicit algorithm for calculating pitch contours in speech, as well as an account of intonational meaning. It has been widely influential in speech technology, psycholinguistics, and theories of language form and meaning. Pierrehumbert is also affiliated with the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour at the University of Canterbury.
Targavar Rural District is in Silvaneh District of Urmia County, West Azerbaijan province, Iran. Its capital is the village of Mavana.
Patricia Ann Keating is an American linguist and noted phonetician. She is distinguished research professor emeritus at UCLA.
Catherine Phebe Browman was an American linguist and speech scientist. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1978. Browman was a research scientist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey (1967–1972). While at Bell Laboratories, she was known for her work on speech synthesis using demisyllables. She later worked as researcher at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut (1982–1998). She was best known for developing, with Louis Goldstein, of the theory of articulatory phonology, a gesture-based approach to phonological and phonetic structure. The theoretical approach is incorporated in a computational model that generates speech from a gesturally-specified lexicon. Browman was made an honorary member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
Kurds have had a long history of discrimination perpetrated against them by the Turkish government. Massacres have periodically occurred against the Kurds since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Among the most significant is the massacre that happened during the Dersim rebellion, when 13,160 civilians were killed by the Turkish Army and 11,818 people were sent into exile. According to McDowall, 40,000 people were killed. The Zilan massacre of 1930 was a massacre of Kurdish residents of Turkey during the Ararat rebellion, in which 5,000 to 47,000 were killed.
The Sheikh Said rebellion was a Kurdish nationalist rebellion in Turkish Kurdistan in 1925 led by Sheikh Said and with support of the Azadî against the newly-founded Turkish Republic. The rebellion was mostly led by Zaza speakers, but also gained support among some of the neighboring Kurmanji-speaking Kurds in the region.
Kurdish nationalist uprisings have periodically occurred in Turkey, beginning with the Turkish War of Independence and the consequent transition from the Ottoman Empire to the modern Turkish state and continuing to the present day with the current PKK–Turkey conflict.
Kurdish nationalism is a nationalist political movement which asserts that Kurds are a nation and espouses the creation of an independent Kurdistan from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
Scholars have suggested different theories for the origin of the name Kurd. According to the 19th century English Orientalist Godfrey Rolles Driver, the term Kurd is related to the Sumerian Karda which was found from Sumerian clay tablets of the third millennium B.C, while according to other scholars, it predates the Islamic period, as a Middle Persian word for "nomad", and may ultimately be derived from an ancient toponym or tribal name, either that of the Cyrtii or of Corduene, and mainstream academic opinion favours the Kurds being descended from Corduene.
The 1979 Kurdish rebellion in Iran was one of the largest nationwide uprisings in the country against the new state following the Iranian Revolution. The Kurdish rebellion began in mid-March, just two months after the Revolution ended, and was one of the most intense Kurdish rebellions in modern Iran.
Ilse Lehiste was an Estonian-born American linguist, author of many studies in phonetics.
Jacqueline Vaissière is a French phonetician.
Joyce Blau, is a linguist who specializes in Kurdish language and literature.
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