The take -ə́ in the plural and oblique forms. They are subject to various alterations inside the stems. In class 2 there's only masculine nouns, both animate and inanimate. In Southern Pashto they are یاني -yā́ni, ګاني -gā́ni and وي -wi (the last one is not as common as in Northern Pashto and is mostly restricted to a few nouns). There are also feminine nouns ending in other vowels, particularly -e (they take یانې -yā́ne in the plural) and -ā or -o (thay take either ګانې -gā́ne or وې -we). For example, the plural of سترګه stә́rga "eye" and لار lār "way" would be سترګې stә́rge and لارې lā́re in the North, but سترګي stә́rgi and لاري lā́ri in the South, while مڼه maṇá "apple" and تخته taxtá "board" would be مڼې maṇé and تختې taxté in both dialect groups. In Southern Pashto, the final -e is pronounced -i when unstressed. A few feminine nouns end in a consonant, they still take the same endings. They change it to -e in the oblique cases and direct plural and to -o in oblique plural, independently of their animacy. Words ending in -āCә́ pattern (like وادۀ wādә́ "wedding") have short -a- in plural.įeminine nouns generally have final -a. The nouns ending in -i, -ā (these are always animate) or -u (these can be both animate and inanimate) take ان with -g-, -y- or -w- inserted between vowels. The grammatical animacy usually corresponds with physical animacy, but there are some exceptions, like مېړۀ meṛә́ "husband" is inanimate grammatically with plural مېړونه meṛúna, and پل pul "bridge" is animate - پلان pulā́n. Masculine nouns ending in ۀ -ә lose it when attaching the suffixes. Generally, animate masculine nouns take ان -ā́n in plural, and inanimate ones take ونه -úna. Likewise, it may be contraindicated by use of the word for "one", يو as in "يو روغتون" - "a hospital".
But when necessary, definiteness may be indicated by other means such as demonstratives. Animate nouns' gender agrees with biological gender regardless of the ending. Gender of a noun is indicated by its ending. There are two genders: masculine and feminine. in ergative construction), and the ablative case is used with certain prepositions and with some numerals. The oblique case is used as prepositional case as well as in the past tense as the subject of transitive verbs (i.e. Pashto inflects nouns into four grammatical cases: direct, oblique, ablative (also known as oblique II) and vocative. When هر /har, ar/ ‘every’ precedes the indefinite pronouns, the combination can mean everyone, everything, each one.In order to distinguish sentences with indefinites from questions, یو /yaw/ ‘one’ may be added, to yield یو څوک /yaw ʦok/ ‘someone’ and یو څه /yaw ʦə/ ‘something’.ĭemonstrative pronouns دغه dağa (this) Direct Note: هغه as a demonstrative pronoun (that) has initial stress whereas the personal pronoun (he, she, it) has final stress.In the following article stress is represented by the following markers over vowels: ә́, á, ā́, ú, ó, í and é. The dialects show some non-standard grammatical features, some of which are archaisms or descendants of old forms that are discarded by the literary language. In any of the past tenses (simple past, past progressive, present perfect, past perfect), Pashto is an ergative language i.e., transitive verbs in any of the past tenses agree with the object of the sentence. The verb system is very intricate with the following tenses: Present simple past past progressive present perfect and past perfect. Nouns and adjectives are inflected for gender (masc./fem.), number (sing./plur.), and case (direct, oblique, ablative and vocative). Knowing other peoples’ language means, understanding their thoughts and feelings and what could be more beautiful than this type of human connection with the people of the world.Pashto is a S-O-V language with split ergativity. Every thought, feeling and cultural traits of a people are embedded with the language of that people. It gives us the ability to understand better other peoples’ thoughts and feelings with totally a different culture and tradition. Since language is the only means or tool that human beings use to communicate thoughts, express feelings and understand each other, therefore, advantages of knowing more than one language are many. As a personal experience, it gives me the ability to understand other people who speak and think different than me. Knowledge of languages really takes you out of that uni-cultural, uni-traditional box and opens the window of opportunity to exploring the beauty of other peoples’ way of living differently, way of speaking differently, way of thinking differently. Knowing more than one language expands one’s knowledge of culture, traditions of the people of the world we live in.