A grammar of the Pukkhto or Pukshto language, on a new and improved system, combining brevity with practical utility, and including exercises and dialogues intended to facilitate the acquisition of the colloquial / by Henry Walter Bellew.

Includes some Pashto texts.

“Henry Walter Bellew (1834–92) was a surgeon and medical officer in the Indian Army who over the course of a long career undertook a number of political missions in Afghanistan and wrote several books on Indian and Afghan subjects. His A Grammar of the Pukkhto or Pukshto Language is a Pushto textbook written during his service in Peshawar. It was intended for use by British-Indian administrators in the North-West Frontier of British India (present-day Pakistan). As such, the work assumes that the student is already acquainted with Hindustani (Urdu). Bellew partly based his book on earlier works, including A Grammar and Vocabulary of the Pooshtoo Language (1854) by Sir John L. Vaughan and A Grammar of the Pukhto, Pushto or Language of the Afghans (1855) by Henry G. Raverty. Bellew arranged his work according to the scheme used by Duncan Forbes in his A Grammar of the Hindustani Language (1846). Consisting of five sections and numerous exercises, the book begins with a general background on the characteristics of the Pushto language and its alphabet, before delving into phonetics, grammatical constructions, vocabulary, and short dialogues. It ends with “familiar conversations” —dialogues that emulate everyday situations and that are meant to be of practical utility. In his discussion of the general characteristics of Pushto, Bellew suggests that the language was more influenced by Hindustani and Persian than by Arabic and that it assumed its present form before the arrival of Arabic with the Muslim conquest. The book was first published in 1867”—copied from website.

The Library of Congress donated copies of the digitized material (along with extensive bibliographic records) containing more than 163,000 pages of documents to ACKU, the collections that include thousands of historical, cultural, and scholarly materials dating from the early 1300s to the 1990s includes books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, newspapers and periodicals related to Afghanistan in Pushto, Dari, as well as in English, French, German, Russian and other European languages ACKU has a PDF copy of the item.

Includes bibliographical references.

English