A visitor to Omniglot has asked me what the Pashto phrase “maa sara minneka” means. I have no idea. Can you help?
7 thoughts on “Pashto”
Do you mean ‘Pashto’?
Yes, doh!
I don’t have my material with me but ‘maa’ looks like the ergative first person pronoun (I think), and ‘sara’ (depending on the quality of the ‘r’) could be the nominative of ‘man’. The third word though doesn’t smell like a proper transitive verb, which is what you’d expect.
I don’t know Pashto, but if there has been some sort of mix-up, this is actually an intelligible phrase in Arabic: ما صار منك “what has become of you” (either declarative or interrogative), although admittedly, this is definitely not a common expression. Given the heavy borrowing of Arabic into Pashto, it is not entirely implausible that an entire expression (as opposed to just single vocabulary memes) might have been imported.
That makes very good sense. The ‘minneka’ just doesn’t sound Pushto or Modern Indo-Aryan.
I’ve found in my files: …sará mína kawel… , which is supposed to mean: to love somebody / something.
A trustworthy pastho-speaking collegue tells me it means “love me”, or “make love to me”
Do you mean ‘Pashto’?
Yes, doh!
I don’t have my material with me but ‘maa’ looks like the ergative first person pronoun (I think), and ‘sara’ (depending on the quality of the ‘r’) could be the nominative of ‘man’. The third word though doesn’t smell like a proper transitive verb, which is what you’d expect.
I don’t know Pashto, but if there has been some sort of mix-up, this is actually an intelligible phrase in Arabic: ما صار منك “what has become of you” (either declarative or interrogative), although admittedly, this is definitely not a common expression. Given the heavy borrowing of Arabic into Pashto, it is not entirely implausible that an entire expression (as opposed to just single vocabulary memes) might have been imported.
That makes very good sense. The ‘minneka’ just doesn’t sound Pushto or Modern Indo-Aryan.
I’ve found in my files: …sará mína kawel… , which is supposed to mean: to love somebody / something.
A trustworthy pastho-speaking collegue tells me it means “love me”, or “make love to me”