pashto

What's the benefit of learning Pashto today if you're leaving Afghanistan in three months and may never rotate back there again?

I'm American but lived in Peshawar Pakistan as a kid and learned Urdu (in school) and Pashto (at home).

I made an open-source Pashto dictionary with a (local-first) word list (with spaced repititon review) that syncs with PouchDb/CouchDb.

I do miss the 'dramatic readings' of UltraESB docs, learned a colleague understood Pashto [0].

It is an entirely artificial language, based on Pashto and Farsi if I recall correctly, that was imposed some 200 years ago by the British Raj as a political decision to submit the local population.

You're right, but: there's a one-to-one correspondence between some of these transliteration systems and the Arabic script (at least the Arabic script as used for Arabic, not for Arabic script as used for Urdu, western Punjabi, Pashto and other languages that use that script).

I wouldn't be surprised if the translation of "compromise" in pashto means "wait til we can kill all of them."

Or maybe it will something far more "marginal", like Basque or Pashto.

(Another obvious thing is just i18n/l10n for arabic/pashto/etc., of existing tools.) Another feature which would be nice is Grugqian "anti-forensics"; Adium for a while logged OTR chats by default, and even retaining OTR keys could be used against you (even if it doesn't allow decryption of past messages, it is enough outside of a court of law to link you to activity...).

Urdu or Pashto) then you could probably tell them apart without necessarily being able to read either.

Let's just translate it to Pashto, it will take a few seconds and then we go back to simple questions, okay?

I'm not sure how much Wolfe has been translated to Pashto, however.