Loanwords in Pashto: Persian, Arabic, Indic and English

At a glance

• The everyday core of Pashto is Iranian: the words for hand, mother, father, sister, two, day and five come from the same stock as their Persian partners. [2]

• The largest group of borrowed words in Afghanistan is Persian. Arabic words of school and office came mostly through Persian and those of religion directly. Pakistani Pashto takes more from Urdu and English. [2, 3]

• Indo-Aryan words came in over many centuries. The retroflex letters ټ and ډ mark old ones, so old that speakers no longer feel them as foreign. [7]

• A loan is reshaped to fit: Arabic sounds that Pashto lacks are dropped, English t and d turn retroflex, and every noun takes a Pashto gender by its ending. [2]

• From 1922 onward Pashto writers coined their own words for Arabic and Persian ones. Some stayed, such as the names of Pashto months, and many did not. [4]

The Iranian core

Pashto is an Eastern Iranian language, and its basic words descend from the same ancestor as Persian. Tegey and Robson name the native words as the most frequent ones in Pashto: kin and tribe, eating, working and moving, plants and animals, farming and hunting. [2] They set Pashto against Persian in pairs: las and dast, "hand"; mor and madar, "mother"; dwa and du, "two"; wradz and ruz, "day"; plar and pedar, "father"; khor and khwahar, "sister"; pindza and panj, "five". Pashto often has an l where Persian has a d. [2]

Some of the Pashto vocabulary has no partner in the other Iranian languages. Morgenstierne lists, among the words for parts of the body, starga, "eye", khwla, "mouth", and yākh, "tooth", as words special to Pashto. [7] After a century of neighbours the line is not always clear. Tegey and Robson give pairs such as tabar and kotak beside Persian tabar and kutak, "axe" and "stick", and say there is no way to tell whether such pairs are shared inheritance or borrowing. [2] A loan is easier to spot when the word names something that travelled between cultures and still sounds like its source. [2]

Persian, the largest layer

Most of the non-native words in Afghan Pashto are Persian, Tegey and Robson write, because speakers of the two languages have been neighbours or countrymen for centuries. [2] Their examples are everyday: ashpazkhana, "kitchen", mez, "table", mirza, "clerk", gulistan, "garden", badrang, "cucumber" and sharbat, "syrup". [2] The days of the week, except Friday, are Persian counting words with shamba, so that "Sunday" is yakshamba and "Wednesday" char shamba. [2] David adds that many Pashto noun compounds come from loanwords, mostly Persian, and that the two comparatives behtar, "better", and batar, "worse", are Persian borrowings. [3]

Which loan a speaker chooses depends on where the speaker lives. David, drawing on Heston's grammar, gives the word for "thanks": Afghan speakers tend to say tashakur, the Dari word, Pakistani speakers shukriya, the Urdu word, and both words share an Arabic root. Pashto has its own word beside both, which means literally "compliance, submission". [3] Tegey and Robson put the same pattern in one sentence: the Kandahar and Kabul speech borrows from Persian where the eastern speech borrows from Urdu and English. [2] This is a matter of the neighbours each group talks to, and the two speeches are described in Kandahari Pashto and Yusufzai Pashto.

Arabic, mostly through Persian

Arabic words reached Pashto in two ways. Most of the words of schooling and office came through Persian: maktab, "school", kitab (کتاب), "book", mudir, "director", and munshi, "secretary". [2] Words and phrases of religion came directly, usually with their Arabic spelling kept and with a pronunciation that depends on the speaker's learning: Allah ta'ala, "God most high", and as-salamu alaykum. [2] David lists the interjections mashallah, alhamdulillah, bismillah and inshallah, borrowed from Arabic for religious reasons and used in set settings. [3]

Pashto has taken Arabic grammar along with some of the words. Adverbs ending in the Arabic accusative -an, such as taqriban, "approximately", dafatan, "suddenly", and fawran, "immediately", keep their Arabic form. [3] Arabic plurals are borrowed too. Where Pashto would add its own ending to make imtiyazuna, speakers who know Arabic say imtiyazat for "bonuses", and Tegey and Robson compare that to an English speaker who says "foci" instead of "focuses": it marks education. [2] David shows the same choice with daftar, "office", whose plural is either the regular Pashto one or the Arabic broken plural dafatar. [3] The Pashto alphabet keeps letters that only Arabic words use. Morgenstierne notes that Arabic ṭ is said as t and Arabic ṯ and ẓ as z, and that ayn belongs to a learned type of pronunciation. [2, 7]

Words from India

Kieffer writes that Pashto borrowed a great deal from Indo-Aryan, and Morgenstierne speaks of the early and profound influence of Indo-Aryan on the language. [7, 8] The retroflex ټ and ډ are limited to Indo-Aryan loans, but many of those are so old, he says, that speakers feel them no more foreign than "church", "cellar" or "wine" in English. [7] The retroflex ڼ and ړ are native. The letters are described in the sounds of Pashto and the Pashto alphabet.

Morgenstierne's Etymological Vocabulary of Pashto (1927) marks many words as borrowed from Indian languages and sets them beside Lahnda, Panjabi, Sindhi and Hindi forms. He gives sima, "way, path, side, quarter", as a loan beside Panjabi sima, "boundary". [6] Breaking of old o to wa has even touched some Indo-Aryan loans: Kwaṭa, "Quetta", comes from kōṭ, and twal, "of equal weight", is an older loan than tol, "weight". [7] Morgenstierne also notes the other direction: the Indo-Aryan name Pathan was adopted from the Pashto Paṣ̌tan. [7]

Pashtuns in Pakistan who go to school do so in Urdu or English, and Urdu is the main route for newer words. Tegey and Robson list mithai, a kind of sweet, and danya, "coriander", as Urdu words in Pashto, and add that written Pakistani Pashto tends to show the influence of Urdu and English. [2] David's example of how a loan finds its place is motar, "car", which she says Pashto took from Urdu. Speakers differ on it: some treat it as masculine, some as feminine, following the Urdu noun, and some put it with a third class of nouns that end in -ar. [3]

Raverty, a British officer who compiled a Pashto grammar and dictionary, wrote in 1867 that he had traced words of Arabic, Persian, Turki, Sanskrit and Hindi origin in the language. [1]

Turkic and Mongol words

Tegey and Robson name the Turkic and Dardic languages of neighbouring areas as the smaller sources of Pashto vocabulary. [2] David finds the Pashto of Afghanistan carries more loanwords from Persian and Turkic, and that of Pakistan more from Urdu. [3] The Mongols who stayed in Afghanistan, the Moghols, spoke a dialect Ramstedt wrote down in the early twentieth century. The editor of Ramstedt's notes on Pashto, Pentti Aalto, writes that the dialect borrowed much from Pashto and also gave loan words to it, and that the notes on Mongol and Turkic words include many uncertain cases "based perhaps only on a fortuitous resemblance". [5]

English and Russian

English came into Pashto first through the British in the nineteenth century and then through Urdu, which has hundreds of English words. [2] Tegey and Robson list aspatal, "hospital", mashin, "machine", jip, "jeep", waskat, "waistcoat", and lari, a lorry or truck. Pashto, like Urdu, gives English t and d the retroflex sounds ṭ and ḍ, because those sounds sit closer to English t and d than the dental ones do. So "road", "dollar", "doctor" and "deputy" are said with ṭ and ḍ. [2] David's English loan is injinir, "engineer", with the plural injiniran. [3] In Afghanistan the Soviet occupation of the 1980s brought Russian words: samavar, "samovar", is in David's examples, and Tegey and Robson list Kalashnikov, the rifle. They add that the occupation was too recent to say whether the words would stay. [2, 3] Others, such as radio, television, professor and police, are international words whose source language is often impossible to name. [2]

How a loan is made Pashto

The change begins with sounds. Pashto has no native f, q, ayn or ha. Tegey and Robson say that in the informal speech of educated Pashtuns, and in all the speech of uneducated Pashtuns, f is said as p and q as k, and the two throat sounds are dropped. [2] The stress of the source word may stay or move: the English motar was heard with the stress on the first syllable, and Pashto moved it to the last, giving the retroflex ṭ. [2] Persian loans ending in -a keep Persian stress on the last syllable, as in abā, "daddy", and ashnā, "friend", while Arabic loans such as bubala do not. [2] That is one reason Pashto stress is hard to predict, as Stress in Pashto explains.

Gender follows the shape of the word. A noun ending in a consonant is masculine and one ending in an unstressed vowel is feminine. A word borrowed from Arabic keeps none of its Arabic gender: Tegey and Robson give haywan, "animal", which is sorted by its shape like a native noun. [2] The Arabic ending -at, which is feminine in Arabic, marks a class of abstract nouns that Pashto treats as masculine, as in mawzu'at, "topics". [3] Gender and the plural endings are treated in Pashto nouns, gender and case.

Verbs are not borrowed whole. Verbs are a closed class in Pashto, David writes, and a new verb enters through a light-verb pair: a noun or adjective from outside joined to kawul, "to do", or kedul, "to become". [3] That is the way a borrowed word becomes a verb, and David's examples of such verbs include hisabawul, "to calculate", built on hisab, "calculation". [3]

Coining words to replace the loans

The wish to replace Arabic and Persian words with Pashto ones is a century old. Khkalay and Wahdat of Kabul University date its first signs to the second reign of Amir Sher Ali Khan, when army ranks were given Pashto names. [4] Under Amanullah Khan the Mərakə də Pashtu, a body of twelve men from several dialect areas working under the Ministry of Education, published in 1301 of the solar calendar (1922–23) a 152-page book written wholly in Pashto, Jawazinay Pashtu. Its authors looked for a Pashto equivalent of every Arabic or Dari word and, where the people had none, made one. [4] The book gave Pashto names for days, months, body parts, clothes, tools, colours, fruit, family members, titles and ranks. [4]

Many of these words did not survive. Khkalay and Wahdat list kashay for "pen" and likay for "book" among those that fell out of use, and note that khabaryal, made for "newspaper", now means "journalist". The Pashto names of the months mostly stayed, and so did laslik, "signature", literally "hand-writing". [4] The authors ascribe the failures to the three tests the coiners set themselves: easy to remember, clear in meaning and in keeping with the speakers' tradition. Some words passed the first and failed the second, others the reverse. [4]

Mahmud Tarzi, in the early Afghan paper Siraj al-akhbar, had already argued for Pashto as a national language, and Abdul Hai Habibi wrote in 1313 (1934–35) that a language's richness shows when long speeches can be written in it without borrowing. [4] Habibi's coinages lasted better. They include lerlik, "telegraph", lerlid, "telescope", and arwapohana, "psychology", and Khkalay and Wahdat give their ease of pronunciation, clear meaning and closeness to the people as the reasons. [4] Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai, in his book on the Pashto language and its writing, set three rules: do not use foreign words, make new ones, and write foreign words as Pashtuns say them, such as Abdul Haq as Abdəl Hək. [4] His own coinages included wulaswaki for "republic".

What the Pashto Tolana and the Peshawar Academy did

The state took up the language from 1937, when the minister of education Mohammad Naim Khan began a policy of promoting Pashto as the national language. In 1940 the Kabul Literary Society, which had worked mostly in Persian, was formally replaced by the Pashto Society, the Pashto Tolana. [9] Tegey and Robson say the Academy was set up in Kabul in the 1930s to develop Pashto as the language of schools and government offices. It compiled dictionaries, printed the works of Pashtun poets, translated, mostly from Arabic, Urdu and English, and made recommendations on spelling and punctuation that writers now follow. [2] Khkalay and Wahdat find that the Tolana did more on spelling than on new words: its three orthography meetings were held in 1321, 1327 and 1337 on the solar calendar, about 1942, 1948 and 1958. [4] These institutions are the subject of Pashto academies and standardisation, and the dictionaries they produced are in Pashto dictionaries.

A parallel Pashto Academy opened at Peshawar in the 1950s. Khkalay and Wahdat date it to 1955 under Maulana Abdul Qadir and say it meant to coin new words but made little progress. [2, 4] Tegey and Robson add that its publications have taken on the spelling recommended at Kabul, while written Pakistani Pashto tends to show English and Urdu influence. [2] A good deal of the word-making fell to single writers. Khkalay and Wahdat name Wazir Mohammad Gul Khan Momand and Habibi in Afghanistan, and in Pakistan Hamza Shinwari, Qalandar Momand and others, with Mojawer Ahmad Zyar doing the most. [4] Hamza Shinwari and Qalandar Momand have their own articles.

The argument over purity

Zyar says his movement began at Kabul University in 1972 and that "thousands of words and terms were created" over forty years, most of them now in common use. [4] His critics say he takes purification too far and wants to remove loanwords that Pashto speakers have already accepted. Rohi, whom Khkalay and Wahdat call head of the Pashto community, wrote in 1356 (1977–78), answering complaints that listeners could not follow the radio news: "extreme purification of Pashto will alienate the language from its speakers. Extreme purification seems neither necessary nor possible." [4] Khkalay and Wahdat themselves call the purification series "not very successful", though the aim of enlarging the language "is strong". [4]

The newest coinages are formed by three methods. Some translate a foreign word, as jal for the internet and hawayi dagar for "airport". Some describe what the thing does, as alwatka for the aeroplane. Some stretch an old word, as churlaka for the helicopter. Linguists, the same authors write, think the first method the weakest, because the foreign structure stays in the word. [4]

Persian stayed the language of prestige. Tegey and Robson write that Pashto is second to Dari in social standing in Afghanistan, that any educated Pashtun there speaks Dari, and that the pre-1979 attempts to make Dari speakers learn Pashto changed little. [2]