Afghanistan Analysts Network – English

Posts tagged: Language

Language

Guest Blog: Inequality in Equality: Linguistic Convergence between Dari and Pashto

Lutz Rzehak •

Language matters. The issue of how to ‘correctly’ name institutions is just one linguistic issue which has become highly politicised in post-Taleban Afghanistan. AAN guest blogger Lutz Rzehak(*) looks at these issues from the point of view of a linguist who speaks three of Afghanistan’s languages and has carried out research there for several decades. […]

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Guest Blog: How to name Universities or: Any Linguistic Problem in Afghanistan?

Lutz Rzehak •

Language matters. The issue of what the ‘correct’ naming of an institution is, is just one of the linguistic debates that have become highly politicised in post-Taleban Afghanistan. Our guest blogger, Lutz Rzehak(*), looks at these issues from the point of view of a linguist who speaks three of Afghanistan’s languages and has carried out […]

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‘Pashto Mashto? Nakhair, Chat Mat.’

AAN Team •

Dear readers of Pashto Mashto, As you may have noticed already, with the new year has come a new name for this series, although the content will go on as usual. Here is why. The inaugural blog of this series, back in January 2010, has proven prophetic when it said the series would not, ‘try […]

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Khalil Lula and His Friends or: Bad Dari spoken

Thomas Ruttig •

It has been a while that I have been collecting examples of how Afghan names and toponyms are often not only misspelled but almost violated in the media. For me, this reflects an utter superficiality because many journalists do not seem to care much about whom or what they speak about (and have no clue […]

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If you want to learn Pashto…

AAN Team •

Sean Mann, a research intern at our partner organisation TLO, has put together an online bibliography to Pashto learning materials. It includes textbooks, dictionaries, multimedia, radio, university courses, etc. It is called ‘Pashto Language Resources’ and is hosted on Christian Bleuer’s ‘Afghanistan Analyst’ website – use this link. You can start with the following sentence: کاڼه […]

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Talking Dari (1): The Road to Turkestan

Thomas Ruttig •

Today, we continue our little series with important Afghan-language expressions that are useful to describe political situations in striking accuracy. This time we turn to one of the most famous Iranian poets – so actually we also could say ‘Talking Farsi’ here. But let’s not be too nitty-gritty. ترسم نرسی به کعبه ای اعرابی کین ره […]

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Talking Pashto (1): One-Liner of the Week

Thomas Ruttig •

Today, we start a little series with important Pashto expressions for field use. It is meant to complement the electronic translation computers handed out to the international forces which – reportedly – contain useful phrases like: “Lasuna porta!” (Hands up!), “Mulla Omar cheri dey?” (Where is Mulla Omar?) and “Hawayi maidan kum taraf dey?” (Which […]

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Pashto Mashto – what’s that? Read it!

Thomas Ruttig •

The following blog starts our new non- but not a-political blog category called Pashto Mashto. It will not deal with daily political affairs but with issues related to Afghan languages and, more generally, culture(s). Cultural issues in the broader sense are often only covered at the margins by media (including bloggers) but are, at the […]

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Read PASHTO MASHTO!

Thomas Ruttig •

Blog-e newin-e Shabaka-ye Tahlilgaran-e Afghanistan be-khwaned! De AAN neway blog wu-lwalley! Read AAN’s new cultural-linguistic Pashto Mashto under blog here, find out what that means and learn more about Afghanistan’s ‘human terrain’. The new category of blogs deals with non-political issues, like language, culture etc. But not only with Pashto… Contributions and comments are most welcome. Xhe raghlast […]

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