Dear Editor

This refers to Nusrat letter titled khowar.
Khowar ('kO-"w�r) is the language spoken in Chitral in NWFP and some areas of northern areas, and belongs to Dardic group of Indo- European languages. Literally khowar is combination of two words, �kho�name given to people of Chitral and �war� means language / dialect i.e. the language of kho people. (The term 'Dardic' or 'Dard' comes from the writings of Herodotus who "is the first author who refers to the country of the Dards, placing it on the frontier of Kashmir and the vicinity of modern Afghanistan" (Schmidt, n.d.:9). In its widest sense the region of Dardistan includes "Gilgit, Astor, Hunza, Nager, and Chitral and Kafiristan" (Ibid).
The area known as Chitral has unique linguistic identity and 12 out of 69 Pakistani languages are spoken in Chitral. According to renowned Norwegian linguist George Morgenstierne who visited Chitral in 1920s and 30s this is the area of greatest linguistic diversity in the world.
�There has been a small controversy in recent years concerning the most appropriate way to spell 'Khowar' in Roman script. The problem is that, in Asia, the 'kh' sequence has often been used as a digraph to represent the velar fricative lxl--whereas, in 'Khowar', the traditional Roman-script spelling of the name, the 'kh' represents an aspirated, velar stop. As a result, some who are not well acquainted with the language have been mispronouncing it xo'war. To add insult to injury, xo'war is an actual word in the Khowar language which means 'the inferior one' or 'the poor one'.�
�Khowar has 42 phonemes. Several of these are not found in any other language of the region. The letters /t/, /th/, /d/, /l/, /sh/, /ch/, /chh/, and /j/ all have two different forms, one retroflexed and the other dential-veolar non-retroflexed. Every Chitrali who learned the language on his mother's knee can readily distinguish these forms, whereas others can never learn them, regardless of how long they have lived in Chitral.�
�Among these the most interesting are the /chh/ aspirated and /ch/ non-aspirated sounds, of which the word Chitral itself is an example. This word is never pronounced correctly by outsiders. The word "chuchi" meaning "tomorrow morning" has two completely different 'ch' sounds. The first is aspirated palato-alveolar and the second is unaspirated palato-alveolar. "Chuy" meaning "night" is palato-alveolar whereas "chuy" meaning "hungry" is retroflex. "Char" meaning "a cliff" is unaspirated palato-alveolar whereas "char" meaning "a dry leaf" is unaspirated retroflex.�
(Courtesy Salon and Mummings)

Manzoor Ali Shah
karachi