ژبه
Language & Poetry
Pashto linguistics
Sounds, grammar, scripts and the structure of Pashto.
Articles on pashto linguistics
- History of the Pashto script: from the Roshani manuscripts to UnicodePashto is written in Arabic letters with signs added for its own sounds. The oldest dated manuscripts are from 1649 and 1651, and the standard spelling was discussed in Kabul in 1942, 1948 and 1958 and at Bara Gali in 1990.
- Loanwords in Pashto: Persian, Arabic, Indic and EnglishPashto keeps an Iranian core of everyday words and has taken others from Persian, Arabic, Indo-Aryan, Turkic and Mongol, English and Russian. Since 1922 Pashto writers have coined their own words for many of them; some stayed and many did not.
- Pashto academies: the Pashto Tolana, Peshawar and KabulPashto got learned societies in the 1930s: a Pashto Society at Kandahar and the Pashto Tolana, or Academy, at Kabul in 1937, merged into the Academy of Sciences in 1978. Peshawar's Pashto Academy followed in 1955.
- Pashto dictionaries: from Mohabbat Khan's Riyaz al-Mahabbat to the Academy dictionaryPashto's first dictionaries were glossaries in Persian, made by Nawab Mohabbat Khan in 1806 and Allah Yar Khan in 1809. Dorn, Raverty and Bellew built on them; Kabul, Peshawar and Moscow later made their own.
- Pashto nouns: gender, number and caseEvery Pashto noun is masculine or feminine. It has a direct form, an oblique form used after prepositions and for the agent of a past transitive verb, and a vocative, and its adjectives agree in gender, number and case.
- Pashto verbs: tenses, aspect and the ergative pastA Pashto verb has a present and a past stem, each in two aspects, and the past of a transitive verb agrees with the object, not the subject, while the agent takes the oblique case.
- Pashtun names: given names, titles, pen names and tribal endingsA Pashtun name is often one word with a title, a pen name or a tribe added to it. The tribal endings -zai ("son of") and -khel mark tribe and clan, and in Afghanistan the law has put a mother's name on her child's identity card since September 2020.
- Stress in Pashto: free stress, aspect and pluralsPashto stress is free: in each word it falls on a syllable that must be learned, and moving it can change a word, as in ṭánga, "pear tree", and ṭāngá, "cart", or mark the perfective of a verb. The script does not write it.
- The Pashto alphabet: letters, sounds and grammarPashto is written right to left in an Arabic-based alphabet of 45 letters, including ټ, ډ, ړ, ڼ, څ, ځ, ښ, ږ, ګ and five forms of ye; its grammar keeps masculine and feminine throughout, and in the past tense of transitive verbs the verb agrees with the object.
- The sounds of Pashto: retroflexes, ts and dz, and ښ and ږPashto has four retroflex consonants in every dialect, ṭ ḍ ṇ ṛ, and two more at Kandahar, ṣ̌ and ẓ̌, the sounds of ښ and ږ, which Peshawar says as kh and g. That one split gives the names Pashto and Pakhto.