The Kurdish language resembles the Persian in that it belongs to the Western Iranian group, but is distinguished from it by striking differences of sound, form, vocabulary, and syntax. Before the year 1919 Kurdish was not ordinarily written: only poetry had been to any extent committed to writing, although a newspaper in the Bohtan dialect is recorded to have been published in Cairo and England between 1892 and 1902, and there was a certain amount of journalistic activity in Constantinople about 1912, following the Turkish revolution.