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The Wanetsi connexion1: Part I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Extract

“Grubbing into the Pashto dialects of Baluchistan would not be labour lost”. So runs a dictum from Sir Denys Bray's 1911 Baluchistan census report, quoted in LSI, X, 112. Sir Denys was certainly right, and it is a pity that work since then has been so limited and so tardy. The first serious grubbing was done by Morgenstierne only in 1929, when amongst much else he “discovered” Wanetsi, a speech which had been characterized by Sir Denys as “jarring gibberish” in the Report. (It is indeed unfortunate that the short extract of the Prodigal Son story supplied to Sir George Grierson for the LSI (loc. cit.) by Bray (below, p. 63) is indeed partly gibberish.) Wanetsi is in fact a difficult language of which to obtain authentic specimens, on account of the fact that its speakers themselves regard it as only “corrupted Pashto”, and are forever “correcting” themselves when speaking to an outsider.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1984

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References

2 NTS, IV, 1930, 156–75Google Scholar; reprinted in Morgenstierne, G., Irano-Dardica, Wiesbaden, 1973, 187206.Google Scholar

3 See LZ.

4 See M.

5 MacKenzie, D. N., “A standard Pashto”, BSOAS, XXII, 1959, 231–5.Google Scholar