ORTHOGRAPHY OF TEXTS ON THIS WEBSITE

The best historical description in English for the orthography of Pashto texts is “The Development of the Pashto Script” by D.N. MacKenzie in Languages and Scripts of Central Asia (Shirin Akiner and Nicholas Sims-Williams, eds., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1997, pp. 137-143). MacKenzie notes some “new conventions” on representations of final vowels, but is concerned mainly with consonant representation. Some variations of orthography and transliteration in Pashto dictionaries are listed at: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/heston/frontmatter/frontmatter.html#differences. The English-Pashto dictionary of Robert Sampson (A Dictionary of Spoken Pukhto, InterLit Foundation, Peshawar 2004) is a recent addition to available dictionaries; its phonetic system “is based on the way Pukhto is spoken in and around Peshawar.”

The following notes focus on verse texts included on this website; the abbreviations for texts are the same as those found in the related sections of Classical Poetry on this website. Unicode fonts are used when possible; notes are included for forms difficult to make with Unicode. Unless otherwise noted, all the texts distinguish between ځ (dz) and څ (ts) (rather than using څ for both: cf. MacKenzie’s “Standard” form); the digraph نړ is usually used for retroflex n in texts printed in Pakistan. Although most Pashto grammars make a distinction between short and long vowels, the orthography for final vowels varies, with clitic pronouns and, less frequently, post-positions and conjunctions varying between short and long, depending on the particular edition.

In the following discussion of particular texts, the abbreviations are those used in the references of the Classical Literature section of this website. Table I has examples with page citations for some comparisons of Rahman Baba texts; Table II shows certain final vowels not easily represented in Unicode.

RAHMĀN BĀBĀ

Rasa: Consonants: No distinction is made between ځ (dz) and څ (ts); instead, څ is used for both. Accordingly, the 1st sing. possessive pronoun “my” is written as څما . Retroflex n is written as a digraph:کانړيkāṇay  “ stone”.

Vowels: A short -a in final position is usually written with the diacritic fath for verbs: را شَ rā ša “Come!” , nouns preceded by a preposition: له خوابَ la xwāba “from sleep”, and compound adjectives بي حسابَ be hisāba “uncountable”. Clitic pronouns use kasr for 1st and 2nd sing. ( مِ and دِ ). Post-positions likewise use kasr rather than a long vowel form: e.g. ., باندِ “on, upon”. In final position, the masc. sing. noun ending has ي for –ay in nouns: سپي spay, “dog”, and the fem. sing. noun ending -əy is written with two dots, hamza, and kasr, as shown for hastəy "existence" in Table II. A hamza to indicate a schwa is not used for negative particles, e.g.نه "not", interrogatives, e.g.څه "what", or as a final vowel in certain single syllable masc. nouns,  e.g.,  ڒڔه  "heart".

Env.: This text, as also the following three texts included here, does not use the distinctive Pashto letter for “my” but instead uses ڒ . The two post-positions differ in their final vowels, one using a diacritic ( باندِ ) and the other a long vowel form ( ڪښے ). The text denotes a schwa by an added hamza ۀ for negative particles, interrogative pronouns and certain final vowels. Both the final –e in adverbs and –ay in masc. nouns use ے. Other specifics can be seen in Table I.

[remaining discussion of this and other texts needs to be transferred]