Art. V.—On the Language of the Afghans

Abstract

In 1839 the British Government committed itself to an undertaking which practically amounted to the conquest, military occupation, and civil administration of a remote mountain land, inhabited by a savage and warlike race, animated by the strongest feelings of nationality. Yet it was all but wholly unprovided with the means of acquiring or imparting a knowledge of the difficult and peculiar language in which that nationality found its strongest expression and support. Such knowledge, indeed, was not absolutely indispensable for the purposes of official or social intercourse and correspondence. The requirements of current business were sufficiently met by the employment of Persian, generally known among the educated classes of Afghans, and strictly vernacular with that large population of Afghanistan which is Persian in its origin and Shiah by religion. But the inner life and distinctive character of the Afghans remained a sealed book for want of a knowledge of Pushtu. A vocabulary inserted at the end of Mounstuart Elphinstone's travels, a translation of the New Testament into Pushtu, and a brief grammatical sketch and vocabulary by Major Leach, constituted at that time the whole of the materials accessible to the English or Anglo-Indian student desirous of making himself acquainted with this language. These were scanty in amount, of little use for practical purposes, and of not much intrinsic value. The translation of the Testament was executed with haste and carelessness; and, though every allowance must be made for the zeal of the translators and the difficulties of a little-known, and, to them, uncultivated language, with the literature of which they were evidently unacquainted, such an error as the often-quoted rendering of “Judge not, that ye be not judged”, by words meaning “Do not practice equity, lest equity be practised towards yoū”, was more than mere inaccuracy in Pushtu, as it indicates fundamental ignorance of the real meaning of insāf, a word universal and of quite common and vernacular use in every language spoken by Mahometans. Leach's grammatical sketch goes a very little way in facilitating the student's progress, being slight, imperfect, and not always accurate or consistent in rendering Afghan sounds into Roman letters; but his dialogues are original, animated, and apparently idiomatic. An ode of Rahman, subjoined to his sketch, is so disfigured with bad misprints that it is of no use to any one who is not proficient enough to restore the text by means of the translation at the side: in other words, it is useless to a learner. As this work bears the official countersign of Mr. Torrens, certifying it to be a “true copy”, the responsibility of these misprints must be borne at least as much by the censor as by the author. The late Dr. Leyden appears at one time to have turned his attention to Pushtu, and to have succeeded in adding some knowledge of that language to his other great and varied accomplishments. A memoir by him on the Roshenian sect, in the 11th volume of the Asiatic Researches, contains some extracts from the Makhzan i Pushtu, the earliest extant work in the language, and the main authority for his subject. This, however, was not philology, and he added nothing to our knowledge of the language. A gallant and distinguished officer, Lieutenant Loveday, whose barbarous murder, at the instigation of the dispossessed Khan of Khelat, caused a deep and painful sensation in England at the time, is understood to have contemplated a systematic study of Pushtu, with a view to publishing the result; a project which was abruptly stopped by his untimely death.