LEXICAL COMPARISON OF PASHTO AND AVESTAN LANGUAGES AND HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF PASHTO PHONOLOGY

Abstract

According to Windfuhr (2014), Iranian languages are a group of languages spoken across the Iranian plateau in an area extending from the river Indus in the east to Euphrates in the west. Thanks to the discipline of historical linguistics and the toils of the historical linguists this study is able to identify their common genetic origins and able to prove the distinct heritage of these languages. It is, furthermore, also able to analyze individual languages and classify them into further sub-groups in the same family and also know more about the history of the people who spoke them. One of the tools employed by the historical linguists is lexicon comparison. This research involves comparison of the basic vocabulary of languages by identifying the cognates. Once the cognates have been established, it seeks to analyze them in order to investigate the historical development of the phonologies of the languages under investigation. This study carries out a lexical analysis of Pashto, a modern Iranian language and compare it with Avestan, an ancient Iranian language. While within Iranology, scholars somewhat differ in opinion over the exact system of classification but two major sub-groups are generally upheld. This study not only affirms that Pashto is an Iranian language but also the fact that it belongs to the sub-group of East Iranian languages. Pashto shows spiriantization of the word initial stops of the Avestan and fronting of the palatal affricates to dental-alveolar position as its most defining characteristics of historical development. Proving the laws of the uniformity of the phonological change in human languages, it also traces out the major phonological changes that mark out the Pashto language and are the characteristic changes through which we can understand the phonological development of Pashto from a predecessor closely related to the Avestan language (Morgenstierne 1985