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Paul8Friday 04th of February 2005 09:37:30 AM
Reason for difficulty in finding Pashto resources - The reason that there is so little information on Pashto's grammar and vocabulary and pronunciation is very simple: it has not been standardized. The language is mainly spoken (not written or read by many) and if it is written it's usually by someone who doesn't speak pashto or who's native language isn't pashto. In fact the pashto dialects differ slight less than the arabic dialects (some speakers of different versions of Arabic can't even understand each other) Most of the people who speak it come from different 'tribes' and each believes that their version is the correct version. There was once a comitte that tried to establish it but it failed, and nothing like has been tried for several decades. In fact the literacy rate for Pashto is about 5%! I've also noticed that the letters used to write the language is DIFFERENT depending on the source. I've seen two similar but different alphabets being used. Also the spelling and grammar are completely unstandardized. Some poets will write a word two different ways IN THE SAME PASSAGE. The grammar also differs between the dialects so only the very obviuos grammar is known. I recommend getting the pdf file from one of the other pashto posts on this site as it gave me all of this information. I belive that the only downside to this is that it is a VERY large file and slows down my computer a lot (I have 512 RAM and it took me alsot ten minutes to go to another opage on phrasebase [the file is 243 pages long!]) I hope this helps to explain the lack of resources on the net.