>sloan@ishipress.com (Sam Sloan) writes: > This is to announce the formation of an e-mail group for the Pashtu >> and Pashto Languages. The purpose of this group is to promote the >> development of these languages. Persons who can speak Pashtu and >> Pashto are invited to join this group. Persons who cannot speak those >> languages are not invited to Join.
>> Pashtu is spoken primarily in Afghanistan and in the NWFP Province of >> Pakistan. There are also some speakers of Pashtu in India and Iran. >> There are more than 16 million native speakers of Pashtu. Pashtu, >> Pashto and Pukhtu are all dialects of each other.
>I don't understand why it's necessary to "promote the development" of >a language. If a language has 16 million native speakers, it sounds >like it's developed just fine on its own. I don't think there are >nearly that many native Swedish speakers, for example, but nobody >needs a mailing list to promote the development of Swedish, as opposed >to possibly Swedish-language mailing lists about particular topics.
This is a valid question. To say that Pashtu is spoken by 16 million people is probably an understatement. It is spoken in all of Southern and Eastern Afghanistan and in most of the NWFP Province of Pakistan and in parts of Baluchistan as well.
The rate of literacy of Pashtu is low. Less than 20% of Pashtu speakers can read and write it. This is due to difficulties inherent in the language itself. There are several sounds in Pashtu that are rarely found in other languages, particularly retroflex and guttural sounds. Added to this difficulty is that Pashtu speakers feel that there is a religious requirement that they use an Arabic based alphabet. Since there are several sounds in Pashtu which do not exist Arabic, they have have had to invent some new letters to accommodate this.
The Pashtu alphabet can be seen at http://www.rokhan.subnet.dk/_574843.html You will note that there are several letters in the alphabet which use three dots. There are no letters in the Arabic with three dots. Letters in the Arabic alphabet have one or two dots.
Added to this difficulty is that spoken Pashtu varies widely. Speakers from Kandahar can barely understand a word spoken by speakers from Swat. The best example of this is in the word Pashtu itself. In Kandahar, it is pronounced Pashtu, but in Peshawar it is pronounced Pukhtu.
The example I have provided here is my own system for writing Pashtu, which I developed with the assistance of Abdul Ahad Bahar, a professor at Peshawar University whom I helped to immigrate to America. I have solved the problem of spelling Pashtu vs. Pukhtu by spelling it Puxtu, which works for both places.
The retroflex sound I distinguish by spelling it XX, instead of SSH or KKH for example.
Everybody takes exception to my system, but nevertheless it works. Every native speaker of Pashtu can read and understand what I have written right away, whereas most cannot understand Pashtu when it is written in the traditional Arabic-based alphabet.
As far as I am aware, there are no newspapers in Pashtu, even in the Pashtu speaking populated areas. In Peshawar, the newspapers are in Urdu. In Afghanistan, the newspapers are in Farsi. This again is due to the difficulty in the language itself.
E-mail poses special difficulties for Pashtu speakers, because nobody has yet developed a computerized script for writing Pashtu. However, this presents an opportunity as well, because the ABC writing system which I have developed is highly suitable for the Internet.
I am not expecting everybody to adopt my system. I am sure that almost everybody will continue to write the name of the language as Pashtu or Pukhtu, rather that Puxtu, for example. The market will eventually determine which writing system is most popular.
Somebody asked me how I came to be able to speak Pashtu, since I am almost the only native born American who can. The answer is that I received a course of intensive training and total immersion in the Pashtu language, when I was a prisoner in Jalalabad Prison in Afghanistan in 1978.
Ismail Sloan
Here are links: