The Wanetsi Connexion: Part I

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THE WANETSI CONNEXION1

PARTI

By J. H. ELFENBEIN In memoriam Georg Morgenstierne "Grubbing into the Pashto dialects of Baluchistan would not be labour lost". So runs a dictum from Sir Denys Bray's 1911 Baluchistan census report, quoted in LSI, X, 112. Sir Denys was certainly right, and it is a pity that work since then has been so limited and so tardy. The first serious grubbing was done by Morgenstierne only in 1929, when amongst much else he "discovered" Wane tsi,

a speech which had been characterized by Sir Denys as "jarring gibberish" in the Report. (It is indeed unfortunate that the short extract of the Prodigal Son

story supplied to Sir George Grierson for the LSI (loc. cit.) by Bray (below, p. 63) is indeed partly gibberish.) Wanetsi is in fact a difficult language of which

to obtain authentic specimens, on account of the fact that its speakers them selves regard it as only "corrupted Pashto", and are forever "correcting" them selves when speaking to an outsider.

The results of Morgenstierne's first survey were published in 1930 as "The Wanetsi dialect of Pashto".2 Brief as it was, the paper was enough to show that something very interesting was afoot. So as to augment the available material

about the language, I myself collected some tales, verses and a vocabulary on my first visit to Quetta in 1961.3 In this article, I incorporated what had been published previously by Morgenstierne, together with a new word list prepared

by him, which he offered to me during the course of discussions of my pro jected paper. This new word list had been extracted by him from new material of his own, gathered on a subsequent visit to Quetta in 1949 but not published. I therefore joined Morgenstierne's new material to my own in LZ, and printed

it just as he wrote it, as "Part II: a word list by G. Morgenstierne". LZ there fore contained practically everything known about the language up to 1967. The material from which Morgenstierne's list had been extracted was finally

published only many years later.4 In one of the last communications I ever received from Morgenstierne?just prior to my departure for a long stay in Quetta on the staff of the University of Baluchistan from 1979-82 - he was most insistent that collecting still more Wanetsi material should be a first priority. The main interest of such work is, of course, to help in constituting a basis upon which a really good study of P5 phonology and morphology can be built,

and a PS dialect dictionary eventually written. The treatise which in 1927 Morgenstierne had promised in his EVP p. 8, remained still unwritten 55 years later, largely because Morgenstierne always felt the insufficiency of his data on

the many and varied PS dialects. Amongst these, one of the greatest lacunae This content downloaded from 101.50.127.148 on Sun, 25 Oct 2020 00:52:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

THE WANETSI CONNEXION 5 5 has hitherto been detailed information on the PS of Baluchistan. The meagre material of LSI, X, 106?12 does not even begin to give an idea of it. Far from being a type of Kandahari, the most widely spoken PS dialect of Baluchistan, Kakari, has a pronounced character of its own, sharing some of the peculiarities of Wanetsi. No systematic study has ever been made of it. The Wan material presented here was collected in 1978?9, mainly in Quetta, but also in Harnai and some surrounding villages. The main informant was Sadi

Xan Tarin, a Maxyani Spin Tarin discovered working as a Lecturer in Botany at the Government Degree College in Quetta. He was one of the best informants I have ever had, in any language ? quick, intelligent and helpful. (It is an inter esting note on the multilingualism and multitribalism of a place like Quetta that not one of his colleagues at the College knew that he spoke an unusual language as mother-tongue until I told them.) Wan stands in many ways in a peculiar position. Although recognized by its speakers as "a kind of Pashto", it enjoys no prestige whatever, and speakers of it are regarded with some disdain by other Pashto-speakers. Really good informants

are therefore hard to find for Wan, and their speech tends to be full of PS. Practically all Wan speakers are bilingual in Wan and PS and have come to agree with their neighbours that Wan is a form of rude speech best avoided in polite

society. In such circumstances it comes as something of a surprise that the language shows as much life as it does. In fact, its territory in 1983 is still very much what it was in 1929. The possible reasons for this will be given below. The conventional division of PS dialects into four main groups, distinguished principally by their phonology, is a useful one, but it is important to realise that it is the tribal connections of the speakers that matter, and not so much their geographical locations. Tribes try to identify with their dialects, for which they

themselves use the tribal names, and this is nowhere truer than in Pakistani

Baluchistan, where the overwhelming proportion of PS speakers are Kakars, and

speak "Kakari" ? apart, of course, from refugees from Afghanistan. Their territory extends from the Quetta-Pishin area of former British Baluchistan north-east to 2ob (formerly Fort Sandeman), eastwards throughout the Loralai Division, and south-east through Harnai nearly to Sibi. There are only isolated pockets of non-Kakars in this area; and all, Kakars and non-Kakars alike, speak a recognizably southern PS, with C = [ts], t = [dz], j> = [S-], and ^ = [1-]. It is precisely in their phonology that the PS dialects differ most, and the standard written language conceals the fact.5 In their lexicon and morphology they differ much less ? with the sole exception of Wan, which differs from all other PS in phonology, morphology, and lexicon so much as to be quite un intelligible to other PS speakers (in a way that e.g. Waziri is not). But in phonology it bears striking similarities to Kakari, which have up to now not been noted in any systematic way, and I hope to include all this in a future systematic study of PS phonology.

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56 THE WANETSI CONNEXION As might be expected from what has been said above, the persistence ofthe Wan language is bound up with the persistence of the tribal groups speaking it.

They are all Spin Tarin ("White Tarin"), and their habitat has changed very little in the past 75 years or so, according to informants. The territory over which the language is spoken has shrunk very little, or even not at all, from that given in LZ, 564. The main population centre is still Harnai (Arna(h)i), in which the main sub-section, the Maxyani, live. The other principal sub section - there are only two ? consists of the Waneci, who live mainly in the

east of the area around Spin Tangl, as well as to the north in the many tiny settlements bordering the Ziarat-Loralai road. The numbers of Waneci are much smaller than those of the Maxyani, the latter being all bilingual in PS and Wan, as indeed are most of those in the north. A large and increasing number of them speak Urdu as well, but this bi- or tri-lingualism seems to have very little effect on the persistence of the Wan language, a tribal matter. The two

sections mentioned make up almost all of the Spin Tarin, and the other Spin Tarin do not speak Wan. The Spin Tarin themselves are a small minority ofthe

large Tarin tribe, the majority of whom call themselves Tor ("Black") Tarin, inhabiting mainly the Quetta-PiSin district. There is also a small group called Bor ("Brown") Tarin. Many of the Tarin now live more or less permanently in Quetta, which has more than doubled in population since 1947 (350,000 in 1981); the Maxyani Spin Tarin there are mainly occupied in mat and basket

weaving, and their language is usually known as "Tarino", a name I found it most useful to employ when in quest of informants.

The following notes are intended as a commentary on the account of the language given in LZ. PHONOLOGY (Cf. LZ, p. 567) (i) A stressed short a is often lengthened, and an unstressed long a shortened,

(ii) The retracted fricatives * and g characteristic of all other southern PS dialects (and for which special signs were devised in written Kandahar!), are kept apart from I and 5 in all dialects except Wan, where they merge into I and 2, respectively, (iii) The c and / also characteristic of southern PS dialects are not merged in Wan

with s and z.

(iv) There is a marked spontaneous tendency to palatalize -1- as [-yl~] and -e as [-ye- ]; and to labialize -ii- as [-wu-] and -o- as [-wo-]. Initial delabialization is common in wu- as [u-] and wo- as [5-].

(v) The phonemes e and o are not kept apart from the "elegant" phonemes I and u respectively, pronounciation varying individually according to the speaker's education and milieu; but the contrast between 1P1 -u and 2P1 -6 is

maintained.

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THE WANETSI CONNEXION 5 7 (vi) The standard weakening of final vowels in Wan makes the m/f gender distinction much less audible: d and a are not phonemically distinct when unstressed in any position. But stressed final -d is kept apart from stressed -a, as in PS.

In LZ p. 568 (i), spa "night" does not exist (cf. also LZ p. 596); and Iwes "to milk" cannot be from *daoxla- (see below). The palatalization problem discussed briefly in the light of the Wan evidence, in LZ p. 568 (j), is one of the most complicated and interesting in PS phonology. With little data from the dialects of Baluchistan, Morgenstierne could only touch on it {EVP, p. 8: "epenthesis of i and palatalization of vowels", and "palatalization of con sonants"). In EVP s.v. plarlai "yearling kid" { -e, which can be weakened to -a, e.g. ya-e > yd. The whole section on Demonstratives (?2) is to be deleted, and the following

substituted.

The Wan pronoun aya serves for both of the PS pronouns haya and daya as a very weak demonstrative, almost a mere definite article.

Sing. M F PI. Dir aya ay a, ay d aya dye Poss dyd aya dye

Obi aya dye dyu ayu dye

dyd dyd dyd

-ya case: ay By a, ay ay 9, dyiiya

ayeya

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60 THE WANETSI CONNEXION There is no de "these, those", and da, da, dd are used as in PS. There is a three fold deixis in pronouns, using different stems; they are all quite emphatic, in contrast to aya. We have indl "this here, this aforesaid" (hic);al "that there by

you, that earlier mentioned" (iste)', a "that yonder, that far away" (ille); e.g. indl xwa "over here by me, hither";^! xwa "over there by you, thither to you";

a xwa "far over yonder, thither yonder". None of these pronouns is to be found in PS.

No "indefinite article" (?3) exists, either suffixed or independent, but forms ofthe numerals 6, yawa "one" can be used for it, as in PS.

The section "Other Pronouns" (?4) is also to be deleted. The relative pro noun, which is invariable, is ca, ce, or cl, also used for "when, what" (PS ce)', also there are cdta "why?", cl cd "everything that", and cdta cl "because". The

interrogative pronoun is Dir Sg lok (PS cok), Poss caya, Obl ca\ indefinite cl "anything, something", also "when" (