I am in the process of reprinting and revising "A Grammar of Pashto"
by Herbert Penzl.

Published in 1955, this work is the only study of the Pashto Language
by a qualified linguistic scholar.

I plan to provide some new material in an attempt to bring it up to
date. I plan to add around 20-30 new pages, provided that I can find
useful material.

Anybody who has additional material suitable for inclusion in this
book, please contact me.

This book is very hard to find. I searched for it for months, and
finally found one in England for which I paid $200.

When the book comes out in a few weeks it will be available on the
following websites:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...SBN=0923891722
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0923891722

--
Sincerely,
Haji Ismail Sloan
917-507-7226
http://www.SamsOwnBooks.com/shop.aspx

Pashto is a language spoken by at least 40 million people in Southern
and Eastern Afghanistan and in the Northwest Frontier Province of
Pakistan.

Estimates of the number of Pashto speakers ranges from 40 million to
60 million, which should make it among the most widely spoken
languages in the world. One source ranks it as number 20 in the world
in the number of speakers of the language. Another source ranks it as
number 35. However, most sources do not rank it at all. The language
seems to be virtually unknown except among those in direct contact
with it.

This is at least in part due to the nature of the people who speak
Pashto. At one time, Pashto was spoken mostly by desert tribal people.
The Kuchi tribes, nomads who live out in the desert with their herds
of sheep and camels, all speak Pashto. The Kuchis have little need for
reading and writing and almost all are illiterate. As a result, there
is little Pashto literature, except for songs and poetry. In
Afghanistan, there are few if any books and newspapers in Pashto. In
Pakistan, the situation is a bit better, but not much.

All this began to change with the Wars in Afghanistan. Prior to 1978,
when Afghanistan was at peace, it was rare to see even a single Pashto
speaker far from his home. Few Afghans ever ventured out of
Afghanistan, not even to neighboring Pakistan.

All that changed with the Soviet invasion of 1979. An estimated five
million Afghans were forced to leave their country to get away from
the war. Three million went to Pakistan and two million went to Iran.
Almost all of these were Pashto speakers, as the war was concentrated
in Pashto speaking areas.

As a result, vast tracts of land West of Peshawar that had been empty
prior to the war, became filled with hundreds of thousands of tents
that had been provided to house the refugees. As far as the eye could
see, there were tents set up, whereas there had been nothing but
barren land there previously.

Meanwhile, many of the Kuchis, the desert nomads, had been put out of
business by the war. Their livelihood depended on free trade. They
could no longer travel long distances carrying their goods from market
to market. One of the first things the new Marxist government of Nur
Muhammad Taraki did in 1978 was fix the price of basic goods including
foodstuffs in the markets. Shopkeepers were no longer allowed to sell
their goods in the market for what they had been accustomed to
receiving. Therefore, they could no longer pay the Kuchis for their
sheep. In short order, one could no longer even buy a chicken in the
central market place in Kabul.

In 2002, the situation improved for the better with the US Invasion of
Afghanistan in retaliation for the attacks on 9/11 against the World
trade Center. The Taliban was quickly driven from power. King Zahir
Shah returned to Afghanistan, after having spent 29 years in exile
since 1973.

As a result, many of the three million refugees in Pakistan returned
to their homes in Afghanistan. This was in part because Afghanistan
was more or less at peace and also because their presence in Pakistan
was no longer welcome or tolerated.

Meanwhile, many Afghan refugees had reached America and had become
citizens here. There are now big enclaves of Pashto speaking Afghans
in Northern Virginia, California and Queens, New York, among other
places. There is an entire generation of new Afghans born here. Many
of them are highly educated and literate. Some are returning to their
country. One of these is Hamid Karzai, a Pashto speaker who is the
current President of Afghanistan.

I am a member and in some cases even the moderator of several Pashto
language email groups. Most members of these groups are highly
literate and well educated. They usually write to each other in
English, but some of them write in Pashto. As Pashto language fonts
are not readily available, they write in Pashto using the Roman ABC
alphabet.

I have long believed since I first became familiar with Pashto that
the key to the development of Pashto is to drop the Arabic alphabet
and use the Roman alphabet instead. The Arabic alphabet is unsuitable
for Pashto because there are many sounds in Pashto that do not have an
equivalent in Arabic and at the same time there are many sounds in
Arabic that do not have an equivalent in Pashto.

Take the word Pashto, for example. There is no “p” in Arabic. There is
also no “o” in Arabic. There is an /sh/ type sound in Arabic but it is
not really the same as the /sh/ in Pashto. Thus, new letters have to
be created to write Pashto in Arabic. Yet, the word Pashto can easily
be written using the Roman ABC alphabet.

Ismail Sloan

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...SBN=0923891722
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0923891722

I met Herbert Penzl in 1981 at the annual meeting of the Linguistic
Society of America held in New York City on December 27-30, 1981. I
went to that meeting specifically to meet Herbert Penzl because I was
aware of his fame for his study of Pashto. I had already written and
published my Khowar-English Dictionary and was hoping to do similar
work with Pashto.

Herbert Penzl was not as up-to-date as I was on the current
developments in Afghanistan. However, he told me that he had been an
invited guest of the Government of Afghanistan in in November 1979,
only one month before Hafizullah Amin had been killed by the Soviets
on December 27, 1979. Penzl told me that Hafizullah Amin had
personally invited him to Kabul for the celebration of some event. The
reason for the Invitation was, of course, recognition for the work
Herbert Penzl had done in writing this book, “A Grammar of Pashto”.

As this had been only one month before Hafizullah Amin had been killed
during the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, I asked Dr. Penzl if Amin
had had any idea of what was about to happen. Penzl said that no, Amin
had been “very optimistic” about the future of Afghanistan and about
his own future.

I told Professor Penzl that I had been a political prisoner in
Afghanistan (basically for being suspected of being an American CIA
Agent) and that I believed that Hafizullah Amin had probably
personally ordered my release. (Boy! Was that ever a big mistake!) The
reason I thought so was that my release had been ordered by Syed Daod
Taroon, the Security Chief of Afghanistan and Hafizullah Amin's right
hand man. I had been released from prison in Afghanistan on September
3, 1978. Thereafter, on February 14, 1979, the United States
Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph "Spike" Dubs was killed on orders of
Syed Daod Taroon, the same man who had ordered my release. Then, on
September 14, 1979 Syed Daod Taroon was killed in a shoot-out in which
President Nur Muhammad Taraki was also killed.

The result was that Herbert Penzl and myself were still alive, but
everybody else was dead.

I never went back to Afghanistan.

Ismail Sloan

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...SBN=0923891722

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0923891722


Sincerely,
Haji Ismail Sloan
917-507-7226
http://www.SamsOwnBooks.com/shop.aspx

I told Professor Penzl that I had been a political prisoner in
Afghanistan (basically for being suspected of being an American CIA
Agent) and that I believed that Hafizullah Amin had probably
personally ordered my release. (Boy! Was that ever a big mistake!) The
reason I thought so was that my release had been ordered by Syed Daod
Taroon, the Security Chief of Afghanistan and Hafizullah Amin's right
hand man. I had been released from prison in Afghanistan on September
3, 1978. Thereafter, on February 14, 1979, the United States
Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph "Spike" Dubs was killed on orders of
Syed Daod Taroon, the same man who had ordered my release. Then, on
September 14, 1979 Syed Daod Taroon was killed in a shoot-out in which
President Nur Muhammad Taraki was also killed.

The result was that Herbert Penzl and myself were still alive, but
everybody else was dead.

I think that I am just about the only non-Afghan and non-Pakistani
Native Born American (meaning that I can become President) who can
speak Pashto. I am by no means entirely fluent, but at least I can
tell the taxi driver where I want to go. (Sloan's Law: All Taxi
Drivers speak Pashto!)

Whenever asked how I came to speak Pashto, I explain that I was
enrolled in an intensive language training course at Afghan Government
expense.

Most do not get it, so then I need to explain that I was in jail
there. Since most of my fellow prisoners were Pashto speakers, I had
to learn Pashto to get along in jail. Also, my study of Pashto gave me
something useful to do during my time in jail. It was obvious that
many of my fellow prisoners were being executed. So, this was not a
case of spending time in prison until I got out. Rather, the question
was IF I would get out, rather than being lined up in front of a ditch
and then shot, as many of my fellow prisoners were.

Anyway, knowing Pashto would certainly improve my chances of getting
out alive. This was a good motivator.

About four years ago, I applied for a job as a Pashto Translator with
a company that supplies support staff for the American military in
Afghanistan. They gave me a Pashto Language translation test over the
telephone. I must confess that I failed the test. Later, I met a young
boy about 19 who had gotten one of these jobs as a Pashto translator.
I tried to speak to him in Pashto and I quickly realized that my
Pashto was much better than his. So, I asked him how he had gotten a
job as a Pashto translator, when his Pashto was so weak. He explained
that he had grown up in America but his parents spoke Farsi at home,
not Pashto. He had not been able to get a job as a Farsi translator,
as the US Military already had lots of them, so he had obtained a job
as a Pashto Translator. By the way, he had already served a tour of
duty in Afghanistan and was back in Queens for a holiday. He was due
to return to Afghanistan in a few days. These jobs pay well over
$100,000. Of course, the Army grunts would not know if he was giving
them a good translation or not, so what difference would it make? Our
tax dollars at work!!

Read this book!!!!

I was in a total of seven jails and prisons in Afghanistan but the
main ones were Jalalabad Mahbas, Demazang and Puli Charki. None of my
fellow prisoners in Demazang and Puli Charki ever got out alive, or at
least I never saw any of them again, but I did later meet three of my
former fellow prisoners from Jalalabad in Pakistan. So, anybody in
Jalalabad Prison had at least some chance to survive, whereas those in
Demazang and Puli Charki had no chance at all.

However, even in Jalalabad Prison the chances were not that good. The
former prisoners whom I met gave me the names of many prisoners who
had been killed there.

Two of my fellow prisoners from Jalalabad Prison became famous later
on. One was Anwar Amin of Nuristan whose case is discussed extensively
on Richard Strand's Nuristan website.

The other was Akhtar Jan, who is now known in the press as Akhtar Jan
Kohistani.

Five years after I had been released from jail in Afghanistan, I met
Akhtar Jan in University Town Peshawar. He was working for an
organization called SERV that was providing help for the Afghan
Refugees. He was working with Abdul Khaleq, a Kalash man I knew from
Bumboret Chitral. It was amazing to meet to old friends together
especially since I did not know that they knew each other.

Later on, Akhtar Jan weote me and said that he wanted to attend
university in England and asked me to write a letter of
recommendation. I wrote the letter and mailed it to the university.
However, after that I did not hear from Akhtar Jan for more than
twenty years. I feared the worst.

Then, his name came in the news. Turns out that he had made it to
England and had spent more than 15 years as a radio broadcaster making
Pashto Language broadcasts for BBC.

After the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, Akhtar Jan like
many Afghans had returned to his country. Recently he had gotten
married in Village Kalkatak in Chitral. This is another amazing
coincidence. Village Kalkatak is directly across the Chitral River
from Village Damit in Jinjoret which is the residence of my Chitrali
wife, Honzagool. They can see each other across the river (but that is
about all. The river is strong and fierce there. Anybody who tries to
swim it will probably drown. Better to walk seven miles to the nearest
bridge.)

On November 2, 2008, while he was approaching his wife's home in
Kalkatak, Akhtar was kidnapped by the Taliban and taken to Nuristan in
Afghanistan. This became a major item in the news, because it was
reported that Akhtar Jan is now a Minister in the Government of Hamid
Kurzai. The details are still sketchy but it appears that from there
Akhtar Jan was taken to Swat. The local Mullahs in Swat tried to
broker a deal with the Taliban to secure his release. At one point he
escaped but he was recaptured by the Taliban.

My book on Pashto language is finished and was sent to the printer
early this morning.

By the end of this coming week it should be available on Amazon and
other online booksellers.

One odd thing I discovered in reprinting this book is that the
original book published in 1955 did not have a publisher. This helps
explain why this book is so difficult to obtain.

Pashto is a language spoken by at least 40 million people in Southern
and Eastern Afghanistan and in the Northwest Frontier Province of
Pakistan.

This book is the definitive, authoritative work on the Pashto
Language.

When this book comes out next week it will be available on the
following websites:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...SBN=0923891722

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0923891722

Sincerely,
Haji Ismail Sloan
917-507-7226
http://www.SamsOwnBooks.com/shop.aspx

"A Grammar of Pashto" by Herbert Penzl has been reprinted.

Pashto is spoken by 40-60 million people in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
plus there are some Pashto speakers in Iran, India and Tajikistan.

Published in 1955, this work is the only study ever of the Pashto
Language by a qualified linguistic scholar.

The book is now available at Barnes and Noble and on Amazon. Soon, it
will be available in bookstores around the world.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...SBN=0923891722
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0923891722

--
Sincerely,
Haji Ismail Sloan
917-507-7226
http://www.SamsOwnBooks.com/shop.aspx