A New Etymological Vocabulary of Pashto: 23 (Beitrage Zur Iranistik) - Tapa dura

"Review - English ""Summing up, the new edition of the etymological vocabulary of Pashto is a valuable and useful aid for those scholars who are interested in the Iranian, Indo-Iranian and Indo-European linguistics, etymology and philology. One can only regret that it was not given to the excellent and competent etymologist Morgenstierne himself to complete and publish the dictionary 25 years ago.""In: Studia Iranica. Tome 35 (2006), fasc. 1. S. 109-122. (zwei Rezensionen)hier S. 122, von Krysztof Tomasz Witczak, Lodz-----------------------""Etymologische Worterbucher sind nie abgeschlossen; so finden sich auch in diesem ""Morgenstierne"" Lucken, die man in einer dritten Bearbeitung des Stoffs geschlossen wunschte. Vorerst aber steht der Dank dafur im Vordergrund, dass ein meisterliches Unternehmen des fruhen 20. Jahrhunderts nach fast acht Jahrzehnten diese Erneuerung und Verbesserung gefunden hat.""In: Kratylos. 50 (2005). S. 89-91."

Pashto is one of the national languages of Afghanistan, which is also spoken by a significant minority in Pakistan. An archaic language of the Iranian family, it offers a vocabulary of extraordinary variety and interest. As well as retaining many words inherited from Old Iranian and ultimately from proto-Indo-European, Pashto has also absorbed a great deal of foreign vocabulary, from Classical Greek to Persian and modern Indian. Georg Morgenstierne's "Etymological Vocabulary of Pashto", published in Oslo in 1927, was the first work to explore these multiple relationships in a systematic and comprehensive way. Soon after its publication, Morgenstierne began collecting material for a revised and expanded version, but thisremained unfinished when he died more than half a century later in 1978. After the lapse of another quarter of a century, it is at last possible to present the long-awaited "New Etymological Vocabulary of Pashto", a completely new work compiled from Morgenstierne's handwritten notes by three leading scholars in the field of Iranian linguistics. In all essentials it remains Morgenstierne's work, though considerably augmented by additional references which take into account the greatly increased information available today on modern Indo-Aryan as well as on Middle Iranian languages such as Bactrian and Khwarezmian. This work supersedes Morgenstierne's earlier "Etymological Vocabulary of Pashto" and will take its place beside the same author's "Etymological Vocabulary of the Shughni Group" (Reichert Verlag, 1974) as a standard modern work of reference on the history of the languages of Afghanistan. Complete indexes of all words cited from Iranian, Indo-Aryan and other languages help to make the contents accessible to those who are not specialists in Pashto or other Iranian languages.