{"book":"adl0957","page":349,"text":"286\n\nAPPENDIX VI\n\nA Brief Introduction to Colloquial Kabul Farsi*\n\nThe following is a brief introduction to Farsi as it is spoken in the capital city of Kabul. This differs from the literary language, which though highly respected, is used only rarely in speaking. A studied attempt has been made to capture the living colloquial which is best understood and used in common conversation.\n\nThese few pages are simply to help you to speak and understand modern Kabul Farsi. Reading and writing the actual script can be learned through the primers used in the Afghan schools or with Dr. Frank Laubach's readers for illiterates published by the Royal Afghan Ministry of Education.\n\nSince sounds differ in various languages, the best way to illustrate these accurately is by using a simple phonetic alphabet. For this reason, seven new symbols besides those which we have in the regular English alphabet have been used. With very little practice these become familiar.\n\nThe eight vowel sounds in Kabul Farsi will be written thus:\n/i/ as in \"peel\"\n/a/ as in \"pal\"\n/au/ as in \"pole\"\n/i/ as in \"pill\"\n/u/ as in \"pool\"\n/au/ as in \"Paul\"\n/e/ as in \"pail\"\n/u/ as in \"pull\"\n\nThe twenty-three consonant sounds will be written thus:\n/p/ as in \"pill\"\n/f/ as in \"fill\"\n/l/ as in \"Lil\"\n/b/ as in \"bill\"\n/t/ as in \"till\"\n/s/ as in \"sill\"\n/m/ as in \"mill\"\n/d/ as in \"dill\"\n/z/ as in \"zeal\"\n/w/ as in \"will\"\n/n/ as in \"nil\"\n/ch/ as in \"chill\"\n\n*Compiled by Dr. Rev. J. Christy Wilson, formerly Professor of English Habibia College, Kabul.","chars":1518,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00349.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/349","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/349","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}