Pure Pashto - Useful or Not ?

[EinDeutscher]

This must be done for the pure Love of Pashto. Involving religion, nationalism, politics, economics etc is not the answer.

[EinDeutscher]

As Rumi famously said:
پارسی گو گرچه تازی خوشتر است — عشق را خود صد زبان دیگر است
Say everything in Persian [پارسی] although Arabic [تازی] is more pleasant [خوشتر]. Love [عشق] will find its own way [را خود] through the many languages that are.

[Sarbani]

Danke !!! [تشکر] This make my life easy !!!

This is actually quite strange, that Pashto speakers find Pashto difficult to understand.German speakers generally use "pure" German. Even the modern borrowings in English is considered normal and at ease with the language since English is a Germanic language. Even latin borrowings we have Germanised, which not the case in Pashto what I have learnt from my limited study so far. All the German states in the late-1990s [with exception of Luxemburg] jointly carried Language reforms which has secured the German language.
Perhaps, the general Pashto speaker is unaware that he/she is using the foreign languages despite having alternatives. It is very strange to me.

German is a bit of a different case than Pashto. In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; they use one artificially created variation of High German (which was mostly created out of the Upper Saxon and Thuringian dialects) as the standard. Standard High German is the national language of those countries so it has the highest status and can be protected in its pure form. Pashto is a different case. It doesn't have such a status. Even in Afghanistan, the lingua franca is Persian not Pashto. A better equivalent to Pashto would be Swabian, Allemanian, Bavarian, etc. Nobody speaks those languages in their pure forms anymore. They aren't given much importance and many of the vocabulary in those languages is borrowed from standard German similar to how Pashto has many words borrowed from Arabic and Farsi. I've spoken to a couple of people from Germany before and they told me that elderly people that spoke Swabian, etc. could barely be understood by the current generation due to how much the language changed as a result of standard German. I'm not an expert or speaker of German so this is just purely from what I've heard.

And the thing with Pashto is that if people know the pure word, they'll go out of their way to use an impure word on purpose to appear more sophisticated. For example, in Peshawar they'll say stuff like "andaa" (Urdu) instead of "hagai" (Pashto) or "zindagi" (Farsi) instead of "zhwand" (Pashto) even thought they know the Pashto equivalent. This then continues into the next generation which is a reason why the language is so crippled. But most of the time, people don't know the Pashto equivalents and just say whatever they heard their parents/friends/teachers say and that's all they ever heard. It's kinda sad how the Pashto words for such simple terms like "bother", "angry", "clean", "start", "finish", "apple", "hello", "open", "close", "plate", etc. are completely alien to most Pashtuns. The reason is because pure Pashto isn't taught in schools/at home.

[Sarbani]

I don't understand that why Pure Pashto will be a problem for a Pashtun. What I see in real life situations is that my illiterate grandma does not understand heavy Persian or Urdu or Arabic words mixed with Pashto.

If some words like roghtoon or pohantoon or tughandey or khowanzey did not get currency especially in Pakistan then the solution is not shunning these words but using it more and more so that these get currency. I never speak impure ,dirty ,adulterated Pashto and every body perfectly understand me .

Pashtun nationalists must make it a challenge to use only and only Pure Pashto and if there is comprehension issues, they must facilitate their listeners and readers to understand them.

Lol, if I speak 100% pure Pashto at my house, then my relatives will get mad and all be like "Wtf are you saying?? Speak normally." I just can't imagine saying "hagha solgar (computer) bandi da cha andzor (picture) de?" It needs to be taught at the grass roots level to have an effect.

What does tughandey mean btw?

[Sarbani]

This must be done for the pure Love of Pashto. Involving religion, nationalism, politics, economics etc is not the answer.

Too bad most Pashtuns loathe Pashto. They all act all proud of their ethnicity and talk about how bad Pashtuns are but that's as far as it goes. They don't give a damn about their culture or language.

[EinDeutscher]

German is a bit of a different case than Pashto. In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; they use one artificially created variation of High German (which was mostly created out of the Upper Saxon and Thuringian dialects) as the standard. Standard High German is the national language of those countries so it has the highest status and can be protected in its pure form. Pashto is a different case. It doesn't have such a status. Even in Afghanistan, the lingua franca is Persian not Pashto. A better equivalent to Pashto would be Swabian, Allemanian, Bavarian, etc. Nobody speaks those languages in their pure forms anymore. They aren't given much importance and many of the vocabulary in those languages is borrowed from standard German similar to how Pashto has many words borrowed from Arabic and Farsi. I've spoken to a couple of people from Germany before and they told me that elderly people that spoke Swabian, etc. could barely be understood by the current generation due to how much the language changed as a result of standard German. I'm not an expert or speaker of German so this is just purely from what I've heard.

It is not an artificial variation of High German, just that for official purposes the most widely understood dialect is used. Dialects such as Swabian German are itself a dialect of High German.
All countries use the most widely understood dialect for official communication.

[EinDeutscher]

And the thing with Pashto is that if people know the pure word, they'll go out of their way to use an impure word on purpose to appear more sophisticated. For example, in Peshawar they'll say stuff like "andaa" (Urdu) instead of "hagai" (Pashto) or "zindagi" (Farsi) instead of "zhwand" (Pashto) even thought they know the Pashto equivalent. This then continues into the next generation which is a reason why the language is so crippled. But most of the time, people don't know the Pashto equivalents and just say whatever they heard their parents/friends/teachers say and that's all they ever heard. It's kinda sad how the Pashto words for such simple terms like "bother", "angry", "clean", "start", "finish", "apple", "hello", "open", "close", "plate", etc. are completely alien to most Pashtuns. The reason is because pure Pashto isn't taught in schools/at home.

That is very sad indeed.

[Sarbani]

It is not an artificial variation of High German, just that for official purposes the most widely understood dialect is used. Dialects such as Swabian German are itself a dialect of High German.
All countries use the most widely understood dialect for official communication.

SHG (Standard High German) is the most widely understood dialect only because it's the national language. Before it became the national language, no one spoke it as their native tongue. SHG was created mostly by taking Thuringian and Upper Saxon, and then adding a few tweaks to it. It wasn't a native local language spoken in any part of Germany before getting official status.

Ethnologue lists Swabian, Bavarian, etc. as separate languages. Also, I've heard from speakers of those languages that the varieties of those languages that were spoken by their elders couldn't be understood by speakers of SHG. So wouldn't that make it a separate language if it isn't mutually intelligible? AFAIK, High German isn't a single language. It's just used to refer to languages that didn't have the consonant shift and were spoken south of the Benrath Line.

[یاسمینه]

[MENTION=1034]Badlun[/MENTION] [MENTION=18976]EinDeutscher[/MENTION] I've never said that low socioeconomic status is the main reason. Probably it is one of many reasons.
Language, even Pashto, is like a living organism. It evolves, changes, is influenced by neighboring languages and cultures (and vice versa). Convergence, divergence and many other processes from which language cannot be separated.

Another thing - being a language purist requires enormous knowledge of linguistic theory, skills of its application and knowledge of many languages.
I think that this knowledge is not easy accessible.

[EinDeutscher]

[MENTION=1034]...Another thing - being a language purist...

I am not a pashto purist; I am just learning it. It makes my job of learning Pashto much easier with the Arabic and Persian words in Pashto only thing I have to learn about now is grammar and the particles.

Was just wondering why Pashto speakers make their language into a Creole when "pure" Pashto words are available.

[یاسمینه]

What I can say after myself, knowledge of Dari/ Persian and Arabic grammar helps a lot while learning Pashto.

[DaZahroJaam.]

it depends on your reason for wanting to learn it. if you want to be able to communicate with people, go with the flow but if you care for the language, learn the original form and then use them as often as you please. that way, those who don't understand it will get something out of it too.

[Badlun]

Lol, if I speak 100% pure Pashto at my house, then my relatives will get mad and all be like "Wtf are you saying?? Speak normally." I just can't imagine saying "hagha solgar (computer) bandi da cha andzor (picture) de?" It needs to be taught at the grass roots level to have an effect.

What does tughandey mean btw?

Interesting. Actually we also exaggerate. Pure Pashto words are few not that much. In Pakistan Pashto numbers is an anathema. they use Urdu numbers instead. Few words like solgar, andzor , tughandey(rocket), etc will not make the Pashto comprehension an issue. Let us do at our level to use only pure Pashto and explain to the listners or raeders if they do not understand a pure word. This way pure words will get currency. Written Pashto is almost pure.

[EinDeutscher]

What I can say after myself, knowledge of Dari/ Persian and Arabic grammar helps a lot while learning Pashto.

No it does not in reality. Modern Arabic is a Semitic language the word order is completely different [Subject-Verb-Object] while Pashto is Subject-Object-Verb. The way verbs are conjugated is also completely different vowels are put in before, the middle and after the consonant roots; Pashto uses verbal affixes to show tense. In Arabic, prepositions changes with the pronouns e.g fiya [in -first person], fika [in - second person], fihi [in - third person]; Pashto uses adpositions [a combination of preposition and postposition] e.g. da/la ... sara and these do not change with tense or gender.

[EinDeutscher]

What I can say after myself, knowledge of Dari/ Persian and Arabic grammar helps a lot while learning Pashto.

Pashto although having the same Word Order as its fellow Iranian Language Modern Persian has a different syntax.

Persian has no gender [ast - is] while Pashto has masculine-feminine [day/da -is].

Pashto also has a larger number of verbal suffixes than Farsi. The verb suffixes changes depending on the aspect [imperfect or perfect]; depending on grammar [masculine or feminine] and person [1st, 2nd or 3rd]. In Persian aspect is formed by adding verbs "to be" to the verb [ام, است, بود]. In Persian the future tense does not use verbal suffixes. Persian as I noted also does not have gender; however Persian like Pashto has 3-persons [1st, 2nd and 3rd].

Persian uses Prepositions while Pashto uses Adpositions.