Yezidi Letter Xa

Xa marks the rough, back-of-the-throat sound heard in Scottish “loch.”

The sound is a rough consonant made at the back of the mouth. In a Latin transliteration, Yezidi Xa is written x.

Two manuscripts associated with Yezidi religion, Maṣḥafā Reš and Ktébī Jelwa, may date to the 12th or 13th centuries and were first published in 1911. Their dates and authorship remain uncertain, so they show religious use without fixing when the script itself began.

How did the Yezidi script change?

A 2013 revival in Georgia reshaped an older Yezidi script.

The older form was consonantal: it wrote consonants without marking every vowel. The revival made a fuller alphabet for modern Yezidi and changed some sound values. The historical record between the manuscripts and revival remains sparse as of 2023, so the modern alphabet cannot be treated as a proven unchanged continuation.

Yezidi is also written in Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic scripts. The revived script appears in prayers, sacred books, temple inscriptions, letterheads, and heraldry. Yezidi clergy recognize the writing, but do not treat the named manuscripts as religious authorities.

Why can old Yezidi writing look connected?

Older texts can join letters that modern Yezidi writing keeps separate.

Yezidi writing runs from right to left. Modern letters are written separately rather than joined like Arabic; historical manuscripts include ligatures, where letters combine into one written form. A connected shape in an old text reflects a historical writing convention, not a special form of Xa.