Learning was fun

The other day I watched “cerfs-volants de kaboul” or the kite runner. It is not at all my intention to do a film review, rather to share a linguistic experience. I watched the movie in “VO” with French subtitles. About one third of the dialogues are in Pashto (hoping that there weren’t any other dialects). Normally I wouldn’t follow Pashto at all, but for the French subtitles. Following the dialogues while reading the subtitles was a kind of revelation. It was really a pleasant surprise to find the extent of similarity between Pashto, Urdu and Hindi: for instance, the noun “guftgu” meaning conversation in Urdu which is often used in North India without forgetting the bollywood movies. In Pashto the infinitive form of this noun means “to tell”. There were several other words. It was a nice exercise to watch an English film with French subtitles while following Pashto (which reminded me of Hindi!). I haven’t read the book , but came across some book reviews where someone has pointed out the linguistic aspect.