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Pashto language
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Pashto (Naskh: ????? - ; alternative spelling: Pakhto, Pushto, Pukhto, Pashtu, or Pushtu), also known as Afghani, is an Indo-European language spoken primarily in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. Pashto belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian language family. There are nearly 40 million Pashtuns. As defined in the Constitution of Afghanistan, Pashto is a national and official language of Afghanistan.
consequence of life in areas of rugged terrain, there are many dialects of Pashto language.
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Encyclopedia
Pashto (Naskh: ????? - ; alternative spelling: Pakhto, Pushto, Pukhto, Pashtu, or Pushtu), also known as Afghani, is an Indo-European language spoken primarily in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. Pashto belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian language family. There are nearly 40 million Pashtuns. As defined in the Constitution of Afghanistan, Pashto is a national and official language of Afghanistan.
Dialects
As a consequence of life in areas of rugged terrain, there are many dialects of Pashto language. The two main dialects are soft or southern dialect and hard or northern dialect. Paktika is roughly the dividing line. One of the primary features of the dialects is the differences in the pronunciation of these two phonemes (all sounds in IPA):
The differences between the southern dialects and the northern dialects are primarily phonological and there are simple conversion rules. The morphological differences between them are very few and unimportant. However, the central dialects are lexicologically different and very varied. The southern dialect of Kandahar is the most conservative with regards to phonology, retaining the retroflex fricatives and the alveolar affricates, which have not merged with other phonemes. The Pashto alphabet reflects the southern dialect. Certain dialects show many archaic features, some of which are discarded by the literary language.
Geographic distribution
Pashto is spoken by about 27 million people in the western provinces of North-West Frontier Province, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Balochistan of Pakistan (15% of the total population), and there are around 13 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan (42% of the total population). In Pakistan, modern "transplant" communities are also found in Sindh (Karachi and Hyderabad). Other communities of Pashto-speakers are found in northeastern Iran.
Official status
Pashto is the first state language of Afghanistan, and one of the two official languages that are used for the administration of the government throughout the country. It is also used in education, literature, office and court business, media, and in religious institutions, etc. It is a repository of the cultural and social heritage of the country. In Pakistan, Pashto is not official language, but is one of the provincial languages in NWFP, FATA and Balochistan.
Grammar
Pashto is a S-O-V language with split ergativity. Adjectives come before nouns. Nouns and adjectives are inflected for gender (masc./fem.), number (sing./plur.), and case (direct, oblique I, oblique II and vocative). The verb system is very intricate with the following tenses: present, subjunctive, simple past, past progressive, present perfect and past perfect. In any of the past tenses (simple past, past progressive, present perfect and past perfect), Pashto is an ergative language; i.e., transitive verbs in any of the past tenses agree with the object of the sentence
Phonology
Vowels
Pashto also has the diphthongs .
Consonants
are present only in loanwords, and tend to merge with .
The retroflex lateral flap is pronounced as retroflex approximant when final.
The velars followed by the close back rounded vowel assimilate into the labialized velars .
Vocabulary
In Pashto most of the lexicon is of native East Iranian origin; those words can be easily compared to those known from Avestan, Ossetic and Pamir languages. Post 7th century borrowings came primarily from Arabic. Modern borrowings come from Persian, Urdu/Hindi and English.
Writing system
From the time of Islam's rise in southern Central Asia, Pashto has used a modified version of the Arabic script. The seventeenth century saw the rise of a polemic debate which also was polarized along lines of script. The heterodox Roshani movement wrote their literature mostly in the Persianate style called the Nasta'liq script. The followers of the Akhund Darweza, and the Akhund himself, who viewed themselves as defending the religion against the influence of syncretism, wrote Pashto in the Arabicized Naskh. With some individualized exceptions Naskh has been the generally used script in the modern era of Pashto, roughly corresponding with the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, due to its greater adaptability for typesetting. Even lithographically reproduced Pashto has been calligraphied in Naskh as a general rule, since it was adopted as standard.
Pashto has more vowels and consonants than either Arabic or Persian. As a result, the Pashto alphabet has several letters which do not appear in any other Arabic script. For example, the letters representing the retroflex consonants // are written like the standard Arabic teh, dâl, reh and nun with a "panddak", "gharrwandai" or also called "skerrai" attached underneath, which looks like a small circle: ? ,? ,?, and ?, respectively. It also has the letters šin and žeh (representing voiceless and voiced retroflex fricatives), which look like a sin and reh respectively with a dot above and beneath: ? and ?. The letters representing /ts/ and /dz/ are also specific to Pashto; they look like a ? with three dots above and an hamza above; ? and ?. It has a number of additional vowel diacritics as well.
Pashto alphabet
The letters of the Pashto alphabet are:
Letters specific to Pashto
The letters below are specific to Pashto only:
The five Yaas of Pashto
The following are the five Yaas used in Pashto writing:
Pashto Latin Alphabet
The Pashto Latin alphabet is based on the following 41 graphemes:
Aa ( ? ), Ââ, Bb, Cc, Çç, Dd, Dd, DHdh, Ee, Ëë, Ff, Gg, Gg, Hh, Ii, Jj, Kk, Kk, Ll, Mm, Nn, Nn, Oo, Pp, Qq, Rr, Rr, Ss, Šš, Ss, Tt, Tt, THth, Uu ( ? or ?), Vv (? or ?), Ww, Xx, XHxh, Yy, Zz, Žž
The letters a, â, e, ë, i, o and u are vowels, and the remainder are consonants. The letter c represents , x represents , j represents and y represents . The hácek (in d, n, r, š, t and ž) is used for retroflex consonants, and the cedilla (in ç, g, k and s) indicates either change of dental/alveolars into post-alveolars or change of velar plosives into fricatives. The dighraphs dh, th and xh represent and . Other letters represent the same consonants as their values in the IPA.
Examples
Examples of intransitive sentence forms using the verb "tlël" (to go):
Command:
- Wë šawanxi ta xa! (pronounce xa as 'dza')
- (you sing.) Go to school!
Present:
- (Zë) wë šawanxi ta xëm.
- I go to school.
Present Perfect:
- (Zë) wë šawanxi ta tlëlai yëm.
- I have gone to school.
Past:
- (Zë) wë šawanxi ta wlârëm.
- I went to school.
Past Perfect:
- (Zë) wë šawanxi ta tlëlai wëm.
- I had gone to school.
Past Progressive:
- (Zë) wë šawanxi ta tlëm.
- I was being going to school. meaning I used to go to school.
Subjunctive:
- Cheh zë wë šawanxi ta tlëlai.
- I wish I go to school.
Examples of transitive sentence forms using the verb "kwarël" (to eat):
Command:
- Panir kwrëi!
- (you plur.) Eat cheese!
Present:
- Dai panir kwri.
- He eats cheese.
Present Perfect:
- Dë panir kwarëlai dae.
- He has eaten cheese.
Past:
- Dë panir wukwarë.
- He ate cheese.
Past Perfect:
- Dë panir kwarëlai wë.
- He had eaten cheese.
Past Progressive:
- Dë panir kwarë.
- He was being eating cheese. meaning He used to eat cheese.
Subjunctive:
- Ka dë panir kwarëlai.
- If he eat cheese.
Questions:
- Cë nameže? or Stâ num cë dae? (What is your name?)
- Çereh or çerta xe? (Where are you going?)
See also
Bibliography
- Morgenstierne, Georg (1926) Report on a Linguistic Mission to Afghanistan. Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, Serie C I-2. Oslo. ISBN 0-923891-09-9
- Gusain, Lakhan (2008??) " A Grammar of Pashto". Ann Arbor, MI: Northside Publishers. ISBN ??
External links
- H. G. Raverty. Second edition, with considerable additions. London: Williams and Norgate, 1867.
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Pashto Computer Fonts
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