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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2017

Bernhard Dorn and the beginnings of Pashto lexicography

Résumé

At the end of the 18th century, William Jones, a British judge in India and one of the founding fathers of Indo-European linguistics, noted the affinity of Pashto to “Chaldaic”. Since then, researchers, explorers, missionaries, army servicemen, physicians and other Western travellers began a long discussion on the origin of Pashto (and the ethnic identity of the Pashtuns) and proposed various connections: Semitic (H. G. Raverty), Iranian (B. Dorn), Bactrian (F. Müller), Indo-Aryan (H. W. Bellew), Eastern Iranian (J. Darmesteter). Though Bernhard Dorn never visited Afghanistan, he was the first to demonstrate that Pashto is an Iranian language in a number of his publications dealing with grammar, literature and lexicography. This paper focuses on the fundamental contribution of Dorn to Pashto lexicography, mainly thanks to the glossary contained at the end of his Chrestomathy of the Pushtū or Afghan Language (St Petersburg, 1847). After presenting the work of Dorn’s predecessors on Pashto, this paper discusses his influence on subsequent lexicographers, in particular H. G. Raverty and H. W. Bellew, the authors of the two main Pashto dictionaries (published in 1860 and 1867 respectively). Through these works, the influence of Dorn reached and affected the dictionaries of the 20th and 21st centuries.
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hal-03955035 , version 1 (24-01-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03955035 , version 1

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Matteo de Chiara. Bernhard Dorn and the beginnings of Pashto lexicography. St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies, Jun 2017, St. Pétersbourg, Russia. ⟨hal-03955035⟩
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