Vocabulary

In Pashto, most of the native elements of the lexicon are related to other Eastern Iranian languages.^[67] As noted by Josef Elfenbein, "Loanwords have been traced in Pashto as far back as the third century B.C., and include words from Greek and probably Old Persian".^[87] For instance, Georg Morgenstierne notes the Pashto word مېچن mečә́n i.e. a hand-mill as being derived from the Ancient Greek word μηχανή (mēkhanḗ, i.e. a device).^[88] Post-7th century borrowings came primarily from Persian and Hindi-Urdu, with Arabic words being borrowed through Persian,^[89] but sometimes directly.^[90][91] Modern speech borrows words from English, French, and German.^[92]

However, a remarkably large number of words are unique to Pashto.^[93][94]

Here is an exemplary list of Pure Pashto and borrowings:^[95][96]

Due to the incursion of Persian and Persianized-Arabic in modern speech, linguistic purism of Pashto is advocated to prevent its own vocabulary from dying out.^{[94][self-published source][97][98]}

Classical vocabulary

There is a lot of old vocabulary that has been replaced by borrowings e.g. پلاز plâz^[99] 'throne' with تخت takht, from Persian.^[100][101] Or the word يګانګي yagānagí^[102] meaning 'uniqueness' used by Pir Roshan Bayazid.^[103] Such classical vocabulary is being reintroduced to modern Pashto.^[104] Some words also survive in dialects like ناوې پلاز 'the bride-room'.^[105]

Example from Khayr al-Bayān:^[103]

... بې يګانګئ بې قرارئ وي او په بدخوئ کښې وي په ګناهان

Transliteration: ... be-yagānagə́i, be-kararə́i wi aw pə badxwə́i kx̌e wi pə gunāhā́n

Translation: "... without singularity/uniqueness, without calmness and by bad-attitude are on sin ."

Writing system

Pashto employs the Pashto alphabet, a modified form of the Perso-Arabic alphabet or Arabic script.^[106] In the 16th century, Bayazid Pir Roshan introduced 13 new letters to the Pashto alphabet. The alphabet was further modified over the years.

The Pashto alphabet consists of 45 to 46 letters^[107] and 4 diacritic marks. Latin Pashto is also used.^{[108][109][110]} In Latin transliteration, stress is represented by the following markers over vowels: ә́, á, ā́, ú, ó, í and é. The following table (read from left to right) gives the letters' isolated forms, along with possible Latin equivalents and typical IPA values: