Ebook: Basic Reader for Kashmiri Language

Publisher: Kashmir News Network (KNN)
Publication date: 2003
Number of pages: 84Language has considerable influence on the esthetic and intellectual achievement of a civilized society, broadly referred as culture. Language not only acts as a binding force for a community, but more importantly, it confers upon it, a distinct mark of identification. For centuries, Kashmiri Pandits have had to leave intermittently, their motherland through religious and political persecution, which severed their links with both spoken and written medium of their mother-tongue. The recent en masse exodus, having scattered our community throughout the country, has dealt yet another blow to our already fragile mother-tongue affiliations.
Another disturbing trend is that the State linguistic authority has, over the years, created an impression through sustained overt and covert means, that Persian has been the original script of Kashmiri language. Whereas the fact remains that from the Vedic times, Sanskrit has been the medium of language in Kashmir which has Devanagari as its script. Later Sharda was developed and liberally used by Kashmiri writers and scholars and thus the script flourished in the Valley. Alberuni claims that Sharda, which he refers as ‘Sidha-Matrika’, permeated not only in Kashmir but it also was the medium of writing in the whole of India . With the passage of time, Sharda adorned the confines of the priestly class.
In the post independence era, the J&K State government accorded official recognition to Persian script for Kashmiri and it received patronage mostly from the Muslim writers. Kashmiri Pandit writers felt that Devanagari was more suited to phonetics and dialectory inflection of the language and they adopted it as their medium for writing Kashmiri.
The linguistic experts, however, felt that some of the Kashmiri sounds could not be represented by Nagari letters or alphabet, hence specific primary and secondary accents, pronunciation symbols and dialectorial marks were developed / devised for better grasp of the language, which received approval of standardization by a Committee of experts and scholars, set up in 1995. This uniform script is more or less in use since then.
The present ‘Basic Reader for Kashmiri Language’ in Devanagari script, is a humble effort by the Kashmiri Pandits’ Association and Lalla-Ded Educational and Welfare Trust combine, in adopting a uniform pattern in translating Kashmiri articulatory sounds into a written script. Simultaneously the ‘Reader’ offers more elucidation on phonetics and includes orthographic lessons in Nagari alphabet with equivalent Roman alphabet, which, it is hoped, shall even help those who are not well versed with Kashmiri. The equivalent of Kashmiri words with their vowels and diacritical marks in Roman letters, make it easy to decipher and read. The ‘Reader’ is designed to be an aid to basic comprehension for both spoken and written Kashmiri.
The stupendous work of Shri M. K. Raina and Smt Neelam Trakru in bringing out this ‘Reader’ will, I am sure, go a long way in arousing the interest in our young and not so young community members in their mother-tongue and foster a deeper communication bond through the medium of language.