St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies 67 Panel Four. The Languages of Afghanistan and the Liminal Areas... Matteo De Chiara (INALCO, Paris, France) Bernhard Dorn and the Beginning of Pashto Lexicography At the end of the 18th century, William Jones, a British judge in India and one of the founding fathers of Indo-European linguistics, noted the affinity of Pashto to “Chaldaic”. Since then, researchers, explorers, missionaries, army servicemen, phy- sicians and other Western travellers began a long discussion on the origin of Pashto (and the ethnic identity of the Pashtuns) and proposed various connections: Semitic (H. G. Raverty), Iranian (B. Dorn), Bactrian (F. Müller), Indo-Aryan (H. W. Bellew), Eastern Iranian (J. Darmesteter). Though Bernhard Dorn never visitedAfghanistan, he was the first to demonstrate that Pashto is an Iranian language in a number of his publications dealing with grammar, literature and lexicography. This paper focuses on the fundamental contribution of Dorn to Pashto lexicography, mainly thanks to the glossary contained at the end of his Chrestomathy of the Pushtū or Afghan Language (St Petersburg, 1847). After presenting the work of Dorn’s pre- decessors on Pashto, this paper discusses his influence on subsequent lexicographers, in particular H. G. Raverty and H. W. Bellew, the authors of the two main Pashto dictionaries (published in 1860 and 1867 respectively). Through these works, the influence of Dorn reached and affected the dictionaries of the 20th and 21st centuries. Youli A. Ioannesyan (Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Russia) Major Features and the Linguistic Position of the Khorasani Group of Persian Dialects within the Persian-Dari-Tajik Linguistic Continuum The three closely related languages — Modern Persian, Dari ( Farsi-Kabuli ) and Tajik — form a vast continuum of dialects, stretching from western Iran to Afghanistan and Central Asia. To draw a geographical line or define a geographical border between the dialects of Persian proper, those of the Dari language and those of Tajik seems problematical from a purely linguistic point of view since these dialects overlap and merge into one another. Thus, it is prudent to consider these dialects as a single linguistic continuum within which a few groups may be defined. A rough classification of the whole volume of dialects of Persian, Dari and Tajik is suggested by R. Farhadi 1 . According his classification the Persian 1 Farhâdi,Abd-ul-Ghafûr. Le Persan Parlé enAfghanistan. Grammaire du Kâboli:Accom- pagnée d’un Recueil de Quatrains Populaire de la Région de Kâbol. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1955.