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...
I've seen the chart and the convolutions as mentioned in Comrie for Pashto but evidently, there are a lot of words of unknown origin according to Wikipedia. Where are they from and why don't they show up in neighboring languages? BTW: a Persian dialect is also spoken by a third or more of the population but it's still recognizable as Persian
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?
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