A Historical Grammar of Pashto PDF Download

Author: Julian Kreidl
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Linguistics
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
This dissertation covers Pashto phonology, morphology and syntax from a historical perspective and tries to partially close a lacuna in the field of Pashto linguistics as well as Indo-Iranian linguistics more broadly. Despite Pashto being the second-most spoken Iranian language (after Persian), all areas of Pashto grammar are understudied, even when compared to other Iranian languages like Kurdish. This work is the first general historical grammar of Pashto and in addition to new contributions to our understanding of Pashto, it aims to serve as a reference for further historical linguistic research on other Eastern Iranian languages. Pashto is only attested for about half a millennium, and no attested Middle Iranian language can be considered a direct ancestor of Pashto. It is characterized by both archaisms and innovations which make it a rich and complex language to investigate from a diachronic and synchronic perspective. This historical study reconstructs the evolution of Pashto from Old Iranian via Middle Pashto and Early New Pashto to the contemporary varieties, with special attention to phonology (e.g. the sound changes and phoneme inventories in the respective stages of the language), morphology (e.g. case morphology, the relationship of past and present stems) and syntax (e.g. split-ergativity). The new findings in this work also suggest that Middle Pashto was an interesting Middle Iranian language, with its consonant phoneme inventory being similar to that of Bactrian, but with a conservative case system comparable to that of Sogdian and Khotanese and a distinction of light and heavy (verbal and nominal) stems similar to what we know from Sogdian (although the Sogdian light and heavy stems work differently).