Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Medler" in Turkish language version.
Although some Kurdish authors have claimed descendants for Kurdish from Avestan and Median, a direct link of Kurdish with Avestan was ruled out in Iranian philology even back in its initial stages (cf. Rödiger and Pott, 1842, cited in Lecoq, 1997: 31), while Avestan, although its classification is also unresolved, is traditionally considered to be closer to Eastern Iranian languages (cf. Korn, 2016: 403). Furthermore, the purported relationship of Kurdish to the Median language, although defended by Minorsky based mostly on conjectural historical evidence (Minorsky, 1940: 143–6), is not supported by linguistic evidence, since information about the Median language is extremely limited and indirect, being mostly restricted to the loanwords found in the Old Persian inscriptions (Lecoq, 1987: 674).4 As Lecoq (1997: 31) states in relation to the Kurdish–Median connection, everything is possible but nothing is demonstrable. But even the limited data at hand provide evidence against Kurdish–Median genetic affinity (Asatrian, 2009: 21; MacKenzie, 1999: 675–6; Rossi, 2010: 308). Refuting thus the Median origin of Kurdish, MacKenzie (1961) outlined a picture of the evolution of North-western Iranian languages where Kurdish and Persian evolved in parallel and therefore Kurdish "represented an early splitting from the linguistic subgroup of Median" (cf. Rossi, 2010: 307–8). Likewise, in his survey of major isoglosses in the historical phonology of West Iranian languages, Windfuhr (1975: 458) concluded on the basis of these facts (and with regard to the subsequent migration of the Kurds into the Median territory – explained below) that Kurdish can probably not be considered a ‘Median’ dialect neither linguistically nor geographically, stating further that the modern Iranian languages of Azerbaijan (originally ‘Aturpatakan’) and Central Iran (e.g. Sivandi) are Median dialects (Windfuhr, 2009: 15).
