The sounds of Pashto: retroflexes, ts and dz, and ښ and ږ

At a glance

• The central dialect described by Tegey and Robson has 32 consonants and nine vowels. David counts seven vowels and seven diphthongs, so the totals depend on who is counting. [3, 4]

• Pashto has four retroflex sounds in every dialect, ṭ ḍ ṇ ṛ, written ټ ډ ڼ ړ, and in Kandahar speech two more, ṣ̌ and ẓ̌, written ښ and ږ. [3, 4, 6]

• The dental affricates ts and dz, written څ and ځ, are kept in the south and said as s and z in the north. [4]

• ښ and ږ are the two letters on which the dialects divide: ṣ̌ ẓ̌ at Kandahar, š ž at Quetta, kh g at Peshawar. Hence Pashto and Pakhto. [1, 2, 4]

• The spelling is the same everywhere, and every reader says the letters in the local way. [3, 4]

Thirty-two consonants and a few borrowed ones

Habibullah Tegey and Barbara Robson, whose reference grammar of 1996 describes the central (Kabul) dialect, count thirty-two consonants. [3] Some of them are not native: f, q and the throat sounds of Arabic. They come in with Arabic and Persian words, and in everyday speech f is said as p and q as k. Saying them properly is a mark of learning, and educated speakers sometimes overcorrect and say an ordinary p as f. [3] David's grammar calls these the "elegant" consonants. [4] Georg Morgenstierne, who counted thirty-one consonants in the spelling of classical Pashto, said the same of f and q. [6]

The script keeps the Arabic spellings anyway. Three letters stand for s and four for z, and a Pashto reader learns which letter belongs to which word. [3, 4]

Pashto lets a syllable open with a crowd of consonants. Tegey and Robson list close to a hundred two-consonant openings, where English has about thirty-five, and a handful of three-consonant ones, as in khwla, "mouth". Their examples include shpág, "six" (شپږ), and ghlā, "theft". [3] Speakers often slip a short vowel into the cluster, so "foot" is said pxa or paxá. [3]

Nine vowels, or seven

Tegey and Robson give the central dialect nine vowels, among them a tense and a lax i and a tense and a lax u. [3] David follows Heston and gives most dialects seven vowels and seven diphthongs, and he reports MacKenzie's observation that the tense and lax pairs have merged in most dialects. [4] Morgenstierne lists a, i, u and the neutral vowel ə, with the long ā, ī, ū, ē and ō. [6] Most vowels are not written at all, and the ones that are written are not written consistently, so a reader supplies the vowel from knowing the word. [3]

The retroflex series

A retroflex consonant is made with the tongue curled back and up. Tegey and Robson write that Pashto is "the only one of the Iranian languages to have retroflex consonants" and that it shares them with its neighbours to the south, Urdu above all. [3] Morgenstierne adds a detail: the old Iranian clusters rt and rd became ṛ in Ormuri, Parachi and Sanglechi as well, so the sound is not Pashto's alone. [6]

Four retroflexes are heard in every dialect, and Tegey and Robson give two words for each. [3]

• ṭ, ټ: ṭol, "all" (ټول), and moṭár, "car" (موټر)

• ḍ, ډ: ḍer, "very" (ډېر), and ḍoḍáy, "bread" (ډوډۍ)

• ṇ, ڼ: lúṇe, "daughters" (لوڼې), and maṇá, "apple" (مڼه)

• ṛ, ړ: stáṛay, "tired" (ستړی), and wāṛá, "children" (واړه)

They add that ṇ never begins a word. [3]

The four have different histories. Morgenstierne wrote that ṭ and ḍ are restricted to loanwords from Indo-Aryan, but that many of them are so old that speakers feel them no more foreign than "church" or "wine" in English. [6] Tegey and Robson show the habit at work today: speakers hear English t and d as nearer to their own retroflex sounds than to their dental ones, so "dollar" is ḍālár (ډالر) and "doctor" is ḍākṭár (ډاکټر). [3] Morgenstierne's list of genuine Pashto consonants includes ṇ and ṛ. The ṛ in kəṛ, "made", and zṛə, "heart", comes from an old rt or rd, and ṇ from rṇ, as in aṇ-, "to grind". [6]

The sounds are not the same in every mouth. In May 1927 Morgenstierne and the phonetician A. Lloyd James spent eight sittings in London with Naqibullah, a Pashto-speaking sailor from the village of Dhudiyal, north of Mansehra in Hazara. They found that his ṭ and ḍ at the start of a word were ordinary alveolar sounds, and became retroflex only between vowels and at the end of a word. His ṇ was a nasalised retroflex r, and Morgenstierne noted that some western dialects have a true ṇ. [5]

Two older writers describe the letters by ear. In his grammar of 1867 H. G. Raverty, a British army officer, said ڼ is a combination of the sounds of ړ and ن and could not be learnt except from a Pashto speaker's mouth, and he compared ړ to a broad Northumbrian r. [1] Tegey and Robson report that among the recommendations of the Pashto Academy at Kabul, set up in the 1930s, is to write ṇ as the single letter ڼ and not as two letters. [3]

The affricates ts and dz

The letters څ and ځ stand for the affricates ts and dz. Tegey and Robson describe them as dental, made with the tongue against the back of the teeth. [3] On David's word list, څوک, "who", is tsok in the south and sok in the north, and پنځه, "five", is pindzə in the south and pinzə in the north. [4] Quetta keeps ts and dz with Kandahar, though it parts company with Kandahar over ښ and ږ. The Ghilzai centre and Peshawar say s and z. [4]

The sounds also appear in words from Persian. H. W. Bellew wrote in 1867 that څ is a softened form of چ, as in tsadar for Persian chadar, "a sheet", and tsarkh for charkh, "wheel", and that ځ is a softened form of ج, as in dzigar for jigar, "liver". [2] Morgenstierne derived native Pashto ts from an old č, as in calor, "four". [6]

In the 1927 notes the Hazara speaker said ts and dz exactly like s and z, so "four men" was salor saṛi. Morgenstierne added that in Peshawar he had sometimes heard a slight difference, with ts a little further forward. [5] Morgenstierne put the loss of ts, dz, ṣ̌, ẓ̌ and ž in the Peshawar region down to Indo-Aryan neighbours, since Indo-Aryan languages have none of these sounds. [6]

ښ and ږ across the dialects

ښ and ږ are the two letters on which Pashto dialects divide most plainly. Morgenstierne called it "the most obvious if not the most important" division of the dialects. [6] David gives four values for each. [4]

• Kandahar, south-west (Kandahari Pashto): ṣ̌ and ẓ̌, with the tongue curled back

• Quetta, south-east (Kakari Pashto): š and ž, the sounds of English "sh" and French j

• Ghilzai centre, north-west (Central Ghilzai Pashto): the palatal ç, as in German ich, and its voiced partner ʝ

• Peshawar, north-east (Yusufzai Pashto): x, the ch of Scottish loch, and g

The name of the language shows it. David's list for پښتو gives paṣto in the south-west, pašto in the south-east, paçto in the north-west and paxto in the north-east, and for شپږ, "six", špaẓ, špəž, špəg and špag. [4] Tegey and Robson's table for the Kandahar, Kabul and Nangarhar dialects gives the same pattern, marking the Kandahar sound as retroflex: ښاخ, "branch", is ṣ̌ākh at Kandahar, xākh at Kabul and khākh at Nangarhar, and رښتیا, "truth", is riṣ̌tyā, rixtyā and rikhtyā. [3]

The grammars differ over the centre. Tegey and Robson's central dialect, of Kabul, Logar, Ghazni and Parwan, says ږ as g, like the east. David's north-west dialect, which he takes from D. N. MacKenzie, says ʝ, and David allows that both a palatal j and g occur in the dialects he places there. [3, 4]

Morgenstierne's Hazara speaker made no difference between the old ṣ̌ and plain x, and said "woman" as xoza, where Kandahar says ṣ̌əja. [5] Raverty and Bellew, writing in 1867, recorded the same split in speech and in spelling. Raverty's alphabet table gives ښ as kh in the east and sh in the west, "pronounced by bringing the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth", and he wrote that the eastern tribes, among them the Yusufzai and the people of Peshawar, say it as khin and use ګ in place of ږ. [1] Bellew wrote that the Yusufzai and the east say ښ as kh and the Khattak and the west as sh, and gave khah and shah for "good". In words where ښ meets ک the two sounds swap places: the Yusufzai say ښ before the ک and the Khattak after it, so that "in" is khke in the east and kshe in the west. [2] He also wrote that the Yusufzai say ږ as a hard g, and the Khattak and the west as a soft j or zh. [2]

Where the sounds come from

Morgenstierne traced ṣ̌ and ẓ̌ to old clusters of r with a sibilant: "camel", ūṣ̌, comes from an old ušθra-, and "bear", yəẓ̌, from rš. [6] Wanetsi, which he thought split from Pashto at an early stage, keeps the r, with yirž for "bear". [6] He judged the hard northern pronunciation to be recent, since the spelling still writes the sibilant. [6]

Which dialect the alphabet first fitted is disputed. Herbert Penzl called Kandahari "the cradle of the Pashto alphabet", because each of the two letters has a sound of its own there. MacKenzie, in David's account, cited Morgenstierne's view that when the alphabet was made in the sixteenth century the north-eastern dialects also said retroflex ṣ̌ and ẓ̌, and that the north-eastern tribes were probably the makers of Pashto literature. [4] Tegey and Robson add that the Khattak, the tribe that effectively established the literary tradition, speak the Kandahar form. [3]

Writers also disagree on which side a tribe falls. Olaf Caroe wrote that the Ghilzai speak a soft dialect, like the Durrani, and Anderson (1975) said they speak a hard one. [4] Morgenstierne's record of the mixed forms, "woman" beginning with š, ṣ̌, x̌ or x, is set out in Pashto dialects. [6]

The letters Pashto added

Most of the new letters are an Arabic letter with a ring or dots. David gives the ring the names pandak and yarwanday, "ring", and lists the four ring letters for the retroflexes, ټ ډ ړ ڼ. [4] ښ and ږ carry a dot above and a dot below. څ and ځ are built on ح. The ye has five forms with different vowels. [4] Raverty counted differently. In 1867 he found that nine Arabic letters never occur in pure Pashto words, so that the language "really contains but twenty-nine letters", five of them peculiar to it: څ, ځ, ړ, ښ and ڼ. [1] Tegey and Robson list the extra letters by the sounds they stand for: ṭ, ts, dz, ḍ, ṛ, zh, g, x and ṇ, and the two ye letters for final ay. [3]

The letters are old and the sounds have drifted from them. Raverty wrote in a footnote that the system of spelling used for three centuries or more was first arranged by Akhund Darweza. [1] Akhund Darweza has his own article, and the script's story from its earliest texts to the academies is in The history of the Pashto script. The standard that came out of the academies follows Kandahar, which is why a Peshawar reader finds ښ in پښتو and says kh. [3] That fact is behind the spelling problems in Pashto academies and standardisation.

The sounds of the standard are set out in The Pashto alphabet, and Pashto stress covers the part of the sound system that the spelling leaves out altogether. The words that Pashto took from Persian, Arabic, Indic languages and English are in Pashto loanwords.