Comparison between Pashto and English

Shahid Arshad :MA English, Peshawar University

The British came to rule over India. They came through sea, covering almost thousands of knots. They landed in Southern India and slowly and steadily began to expand in all directions. As soon as they came in contact with Northern Indians, they were amazed at the similarity of some words with their mother tongue. They found words, archaic and classical, in English literature either coming from Greek, Roman or their own native Germanic.

The similarities were not considered to be accidental because these were so numerous and well systematic that could hardly be laid hidden from philologists. Philologists all over Europe began to study classical Indian dialects, Sanskrit, Bengali, Jati and scores of others. Speaking to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in February 1786, the English Orientalist and Jurist Sir William Jones uttered his famous pronouncement.

The Sanskrit language, whatever be it antiquity, is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a strong affinity, both in roots of verbs and in the forms of Grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident, so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source. This was the beginning of a new era. The era of discovering not in sea, but in language. Later on philologists separated those languages into groups which were spoken in Europe and Asia, on the basis of their similarity of vocabulary and grammatical structure with each other. The philologists did this by studying and judging ancient scriptures of these languages. Giving the parent language the name Indo European or Proto Indo European and dividing them in two branches and many groups like Indian, Iranian, Germanic, Latin, Greek, Celtic, Slar, Baltic, Armenian, Albanian, Tocharian and Hittite.

Pashto is classified with the Iranian group. There is another tendency in almost every other Indo European language, to bear similarities out of the group despite the division of these into different groups and two branches West and East that could be well compared with hard and guttural Northern Pashto with that of the Southern Soft Pashto.

To supplement the family tree model and overcome these difficulties, Johannes Schmidt proposed the wave theory in 1872. This theory recognizes the gradual spread of change throughout a dialect, language of group of languages, much a wave expands on the surface of a pond from the point where a Pebble (i.e., the source of the change) has been tossed in. Dialects are formed by the spread of different starting points and at different rates, some changes reinforce each other while others only partially 
overlap or affect only a certain area much as the waves formed by a cattering of pebbles thrown into the pond may partially overlap.

Any native speaker of Pashto from any remote corner of the remotest area, when tries to learn English, he becomes surprised with the similarities between verbs, nouns, prepositions, Articles, adverbs, etc. with no other language but English or perhaps with the whole Germanic group.

It is very difficult to assume what Pashto was spoken in the times of Alexander the Great of the White Huns, because we have no satisfactory old Pashto when quite out of the influence of Indian, Iranian and Arabic. It is a question which is answerable. For example, the word for house in old Indic is 'Ghar' and cluster of houses is 'Gram'. Pashto and Punjabi words for houses are 'Kor' and 'Kar' and Punjabi word for village is 'Gran'. Despite the fact that these two languages are classed separately. The wave theory cannot act without that very much ignored fact that it were people who carried waves by conquest and invasions.

The similarities between Pashto and English are so numerous and well according to laws that these cannot be avoided. All English words mentioned here are Germanic in Root Stock. The abbreviations S.P stand for Southern Karlani Pashto, N.P for Northern Yousufzai and Mohmand Pashto, O.P for Old Pashto and O.E for Old English.

Here one point must be kept in mind that there are some rules corresponding to voices before or after a word r (d) corresponds to (R-L-D-N-T, RL-BL-NL-DR-TR-RT) (ND, DN, NR)

Note: Sh, Kh corresponds to Th or T sound

Note: In the name of things, both English and Pashto, T is added in the end.

KhyberOrg

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