From: nervous@...
Message: 64380
Date: 2009-07-14
Afghanistan is a very mountainous country and mountans make great dividing lines for isoglosses. Comparable examples include the northwestern (i think) Iranian languages in the Caucasus, or Albanian as the last Thracio-Illyrian language surrounded by Greek and Slavic languages, etc. A lot of the relatively basic words are recognizable or at least can be compared with simple phonological changes; Wikipedia has a nice comparison table of various Iranian languages, to include Farsi, Kurdish, Avestan, Old Persian, etc...
After reading Comrie, I saw how bizarre Pashto looks compared to Persian. I understand they have about 3,000 or more years of separation but they are still right next to one another and Pashto is virtually surrounded by other Indo-Iranian languages. I checked Wikipedia and this is what it says about the vocabulary.
Wikipedia "Pashto": In Pashto, most of the native elements of the lexicon are related to other Eastern Iranian languages languages; those words can be easily compared to those known from Avestan, Ossetic and Pamir languages. However, a remarkably large number of words is special to Pashto.[24] Post 7th century borrowings came primarily from Arabic. Modern borrowings come from Persian[25] and Hindi-Urdu,[ 25], with the modern educated speech borrowing words from English,[26] French[26] and German.[26] Many words of the educated and scientific vocabulary come from the Persian Arabic tradition.[26]
So why did Pashto undergo such a radical phonological restructuring? It seems as out there as Armenian and Albanian. Is there some kind of unknown substrate underneath Pashto?