Karud: the weapon that did not exist:-)

[ariel]

Alan,

The point is that there are no two different spellings of Kard and Karud. In Persian it is spelled Kard and nothing else. As you have previously noted, the soft rolling of "r" gives an aural impression of yet another vowel after it ( "u" for Gilchrist and Moser, "e" for Holstein): an epenthesis. Karud is a word that did not exist in written form: it is just a result of a phonetical mishap.

That was the salient point of my inquiry into the origin of the word Karud in the contemporary Western literature, no more.

I find it amusing that there still are attempts to use a phonetical error to officially create a separate class of realia. Some phonetical peculiarities acquire a life of their own: in Arabic there is no phoneme "p"; thus the language of Pars became Farsi and Greco-Roman Neapolis became Nablus. Still, they refer to the same things.

As to the usage of Karud in unofficial discussions, I have no beef with it.

My point referred to "professional literature", and I clearly indicated it in the last sentence of my original post.