Question on Khushal Khan "Passion of Afghan" verse

[salman47]

i was also a bit suspicious about this verse. in khushals time there was no distinction between afghan and pashtun, in fact based off literary work it seems like we used afghan almost exclusively so then why would khushal khattak need to make that statement? in his time surrounding groups probably never even heard of the word pashtun, only afghan so why would he need to make such a bold statement? to me this seems like a more modern nationalism after the durand line was formed being pushed as history.

and does anyone know if the word pashtun was even used during speech back 300 years ago? like i mentioned above everything ive read only uses afghan so im a little confused whether that was only for writing or if people exclusively used it while talking too

Pashtun/Pakhtun/Pukhtun/Pushtun/etc.. is an endonym, i.e. thats what we call ourselves.
While on the other hand Pathan(for Hindustan) and Afghan(for rest of the world) are exonyms, i.e. what others call us.

E.g. If you meet a Finnish person(who only knows Finnish) and 'Finnish/Finland'(while pointing your finger towards him/her), they will be super confused of what you just said!
P.S. Finnish is exonym while Suomi I think is endonym.

[Qami]

I don'tknow what exactly you refer to, but in older times, Romans in form of Rumi, was used for greeks and even for turks from west Anatolia and for greeks generally. Till now we call the Turkish speaking Greeks of South Georgia Urum

[Iblis_Efreetzai]

Meaning this stanza is a forgery. It makes sense too since Romans as far as we know never encountered Pashtuns in warfare of any sort. The person who forged it should have known this and done a better job.

Well I wouldn't be so prompted to outrightly declare it as a forgery. Let's recall that "Rum" was often a term that was synonymous with Europe. Europeans did certainly travel and venture to the areas of Afghanistan, albeit in smaller numbers. I don't believe they ever had direct combat with Afghans until the 18th century, however legendary tales do spread far and fast through trade routes of Central Asia.

[Iblis_Efreetzai]

Pashtun/Pakhtun/Pukhtun/Pushtun/etc.. is an endonym, i.e. thats what we call ourselves.
While on the other hand Pathan(for Hindustan) and Afghan(for rest of the world) are exonyms, i.e. what others call us.

E.g. If you meet a Finnish person(who only knows Finnish) and 'Finnish/Finland'(while pointing your finger towards him/her), they will be super confused of what you just said!
P.S. Finnish is exonym while Suomi I think is endonym.

Yep, Same with Albanians, that's an exonym, but in their own language Albanians call themselves Shqiptare.

[khushal]

A good example would be Germany aka Deutschland, in French as Allemagne, in Italian(and also Ancient Rome) as Germania and they call its people Tedeschi and in Polish as Niemcy.

People that live in the middle of a region usually have many names.

[khushal]

Khushal Khattak was a learned man so him mentioning Rum would not be far fetched even though the average Pashtun probably did not know what a Roman was.