Orthography and Phonemes in Pashto (Afghan) Herbert Penzl Journal of the Americ

Orthography and Phonemes in Pashto (Afghan) Herbert Penzl Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 74, No. 2. (Apr. - Jun., 1954), pp. 74-81. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0279%28195404%2F06%2974%3A2%3C74%3AOAPIP%28%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F Journal of the American Oriental Society is currently published by American Oriental Society. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/aos.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Sun Feb 10 08:08:13 2008 $4 EBERHARD: Preliminary Note on Place Names in Mediecal China All auspicious li names which occur more than once and in different localities occur more than once in different places of the Kansu region. I n the case of the geographical names, three occur in different parts of the same area (Honan). But one occurs once in the Honan and once in the Hopei area; 3 occur once each in Kansu and once each in Honan; one occurs once in Kansu and once this same name reoccurs in Hopei. I t is possible that immigrants coming from the central parts of China transferred their local names to their new settlement in Eansu. Population data seem to substantiate this theory,12 but the material at hand does not suffice to prove this hypothesis. l2The classical case of this type has been studied by H. H. Dubs (in his " A Roman Influence upon Chinese In conclusion it might be stated that li names in medieval China show certain peculiarities which deserve more extensive study, because they may lead to a better understanding of the history and type of Chinese settlement. They appear, how- ever, to yield fewer names of aboriginal tribes than names of hsiang (county) or hsien (district) and to be more closely connected with the Chinese settlers as far as the Kansu region is concerned. Painting," Classical Philology, 38 ( 1943), 17 foot-note). He proved that Roman soldiers, called as men of Li- chien, taken prisoner in 36 B. c., were resettled in Kansu in a settleme~t with the same name Li-chien. The docu- ments, unfortunately, seem to mention only one Han time citizen of this place, a certain Erh Ts'ang, 30 years old, 7.2 Chinese feet high, dark complexion, a higher army official (Chii-yen Han-chien, vol. 3, p. 6b) ; it seems very unlikely that this man was one of these prisoners. ORTHOGRAPHY AND I'HONEMES I N PASHTO (AFGHAN) 1. IRTRODUCTION 1 . ORTHOGRAPHY SPELLINGS, AND the written reflexes of the phonemic systems, are the primary source material in historical linguistics. There are linguists in this country who consider the study of native writing in its relation to native speech of no importance in descriptive linguistics. I t is true that the deliberate separation of ortho- graphy and language in the elementary teaching of oriental languages has turned out to be a great pedagogical improvement. I t is less certain that the cavalier treatment of native orthographic sys- tems by some linguists can be justified; it mostly provided a convenient rationalization for their own " illiteracy." I n communication, orthogra- phies constitute written cocles for language mes- sages. The relation between language message and its code is always of relevance to a linguist, par- ticularly if the code is analyzable and describable by linguistic techniques. Xutual interaction between writing and speech, such as spelling-pronunciations, hyperurbanisms, naive spellings, has been observed in the great literary languages of the West. Similar relations should be investigated in languages elsewhere. It is the purpose of this article to examine briefly the correlation between the native orthography and the phonemic systems of Nodern Pashto and its dialects. We shall first take up the prosodic features (4.), then tlle Pashto vowel phonemes (5.) and the Pasllto consonant phonemes ( 6 . ) , and their representation. Tlie dialectal variation of Pashto is considerable, but only three standard types have emerged: the type of I'eshawar; the Eastern type; the Eanda- har t\ pe. The difl'erenees between these three main dialectal types are not clearly expressed by corre- spollding regional variations of tlle orthography.' ?J7e shall find, however, that there is substantial agreement between the consonantal phonemes of the Randahar dialect (6.3 f.) and the orthographic system unil-ersally used, while the other two main dialectal types and their subdialects do not agree with the orthography. A history of the rise and de1-elopment of Pashto orthography cannot be written, since specific historical references are lacking and the available Pashto manuscripts are unfortunately neither old nor numerous enough to provide sufficient source material. Penzl, JSOS 71 (1951), 97. - - 75 PENZL: Orthography and Phonemes in Pashto (Afghan) 2. THE PASHTO ALPHABET. 2.1. is written in the Naskh script of the Arabic alphabet both in Afghanistan and in western Pakistan. The Pashto alphabet contains also the Arabic svmbols of the Persian alphabet. I n addition to these there are eight special~ashto symbols: for the retroflex consonants r r (rree), nn (nnun), dd (ddaal), tt (ttee) (6.2) ; for the clusters ts (tsee), dz (dzee) (6.3) ;for the spirants ss (ssee), zz (zzee) (6.4). The Pashto names of the symbols show the cor- responding consonant phonemes in initial position e. g./b/ in bee, Inn/ in nnun, etc. Afghan gram- marians usually list 30 alphabetic symbols in the following order: alif bee pee tee ttee dzhim tshee khee tsee dzee dual ddaal ree rree zee zhee zzee sin shin ssin (ssee) ghayn kaaf guaf laam mim nun nnun waaw hee yee. They call these symbols "basic sounds " (asli aawaazuna, Pers. mwaazhaa i asli) or "true letters " (Pers. buruf i sahib) (A 1f., R IV. 4-8, H 116), and usually also list the eight special Pashto symbols separately. 2.2. I n Afghan grammars the remaining ten Arabic symbols that only appear in Arabic-Persian loan-words are usually given in a separate list: fee qaaf 'ayn bee twee ;wad see zwaad g a l Swee. They are called " Arabic letters " ('arabi huruf) or We shall quote, as in JAOS 71, the following Afghan grammatical studies by the initials of their authors: M = Saalih Muhammad Khaan, Passtoo Zheba, let part: Kabul 1316 (1937) ; 2d part: IS17 (1938) (in Per- sian) ; A =Muhammad 'AZam Ayaazi, De Passtoo Qawaa'id; Kabul, 1324 (1945) ; R I = gadiqullah Rishtin, De Passtoo Eeli, 6th vol.; Kabul, 1326 (1947) ; R I1 = De Passtoo Keli, Lumrray Lyaarssuwunkey, Kabul 1326 (1947) ; R I11 = De Passtoo Isl~tiqaaquna aw Terkibuna, Kabul 1327 (1948); R IV =Passtoo Qraamar dzhus i awal, Engl. title: Grammar of Pashtu, First Part; Kabul, Qaws 1327 (December 1948) (in Persian) ; H = 'Abdul g a y Habibi, De Passtoo Adabiaatu Taarikh, vol. I ; Engl. title: A History o f Pashtu Literature, Kabul 1325 (1946) ; Rah. =Qazi Rahimullah Khan, The Modern Pushtu Instructor, vol. I, Peshawar, 1938 (in English). The sequence of the five symbols that consist of modifications of Arabic h varies sometimes: A 1: dzh kh tsh ts d z ; R 111.3: dzh tsh kh dz t s ; R IV.6: dzh tsh ts dz kk. R IV. 8 f. would prefer uniform names for all letters: dzhee or dzha (dzhe) for dzhim; shee or sha (she) for shin, etc. "borrowed sounds" (Pers. aawaazhaa i musti'aar) (A 1, R IV. 9 f., H 116). Only the first four Arabic symbols correspond potentially to phonemes the others are just ad- (6.11) : ,f, /q/ ditional symbols for /t/ Is/jz/. 3.1. It is inconvenient in our discussion of Arabic orthography to have to use a Latin tran- scription exclusively. But such a transcription is indispensable in phonemic discussions. The ques- tion of the creation of an auxiliary Latin alphabet for Pashto has received some attention in Af- ghanistan. No alphabet has been officially adopted, but various government agencies have their own pet schemes. Previous foreign studies of Pashto, e. g. by Raverty, Bellew, Trumpp, Roos-Keppel, Lorimer, Gilbertson have used a variety of symbols. It is necessary to increase the number of Latin symbols, if each phoneme is to be represented by one symbol. The following methods have been adopted: the borrowing of symbols uploads/Geographie/ orthography-and-phonemes-in-pashto-afghan.pdf

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