St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

66 Санкт-Петербургская международная конференция по афганистике Секция 4. Языки Афганистана и трансграничных регионов... There are two main varieties of Pashto in Afghanistan: the Eastern one and the Kandahar one. The dialect of Kandahar is spoken in Kandahar, Farah and Herat provinces. It has enjoyed a great prestige inside and outside of Afghanistan. The Kandahar dialect is considered the most conservative 1 because it is the only one that has a phonemic system corresponding to the conventional system of Pashto orthography, which may be traced in early Pashto manuscripts. That is why Kanda- har is considered the cradle of Pashto alphabets 2 . According to M. Henderson, the dialect of Kandahar has retained archaic features for the reason that it was spoken in the areas isolated from important trade routes while other dialects were located mostly along them 3 . D. N. Mackenzie on the contrary termed the dialect of Kandahar an “aberrant dialect” 4 . G. Morgenstierne was also of the opinion that the prestigious and conservative dialect is that of theYusufzais: “Most probably the tendency towards velarization arose among theYusufzais andMohmands, and spread from them to the neighbouring tribes. When the orthography of Pashto was fixed in the 16 th century, the distinction between ṣ̣̣̌, ẓ̌ and x , g seems still to have been preserved even among the north-eastern tribes, who were probably the creators of Pashto literature. It may be noticed that a similar velarization of ṣ̣̣̌, ẓ̌ is found in some neighbouring Dardic dialects” 5 . On the Penzl and Morgenstierne’s statements concerning the statuses, historical positions and relations of the western and eastern Pashto dialects D. N. Mackenzie commented that “We have seen that the Kandahar dialect has preserved all the con- sonant phonemes expressed in the standard alphabet, but that while also preserving the full range of vowel phonemes it has put them to use in novel ways. The other dialects, particularly of the north-east, have abandoned a number of consonant pho- nemes but have generally confirmed the vowels in their morphological positions. It is an obvious inference that an older stage of Pashto, still current in the seventeenth century if the orthographic evidence is trustworthy, combined a ‘south-western’ consonant system with a ‘north-eastern’ vowel phoneme system” 6 . In this paper these two dialects are studied in comparison and their differences and similarities are identified. 1 Henderson Michael M. T. Four varieties of Pashto // Journal of the American Oriental Society . Vol. 103, No. 3 (Jul.-Sep., 1983). P. 595. 2 Penzl Herbert. A grammar of Pashto; a descriptive study of the dialect of Kandahar. Washington: American Council of Learned Societies, 1955. P. 9–10. 3 Henderson M. Ibid . P. 595. 4 Mackenzie D. N. Review of a Short grammatical Outline of Pashto by D. A. Shafeev translated into English by Herbert H. Paper // Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , University of London, Vol. 28, No. 3 (1965). P. 640. 5 Morgenstierne Georg. Report on a Linguistic Mission to North-western India. Oslo: Instituttet for Sammenlingnende Kulturskning, 1932. P. 17. 6 Mackenzie D. N. A Standard Pashto // Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , University of London. Vol. 22, No. 1/3, 1959. P. 235.