An alternate name used by the Ormur people is Baraki. It is believed that there were eight to ten thousand families in the Logar area at the beginning of the 19th century and approximately four to five hundred families in Kaniguram at the beginning of the 20th century. The Ormur tribe does not occupy an ethnically homogeneous territory. In Afghanistan, the Ormur people live in mixed communities with both Tajiks and Pashtun. Whereas, in Pakistan, the Ormur people live only with the Pashtuns.[6]
Early history of the tribe can be traced in Herodotus' book. The Persian Emperor Darius Hystaspes; Governor of Egypt conquered the Greek colonies of Barca and Cyrene in Libya and took them to Egypt on their return from expedition. At this time, the King returned from his Scythian campaign to his capital, Susa. The Barakis were given a village in Bactria to live in, later named Barke. After two thousand three hundred and fifty years, the village was still inhabited in 1891 within the same territory.[3]
Ormuri language
The name 'Ormur' (orməṛ) is originally derived from Pashto (meaning fire). The first man to have made mention of the Baraki language was Babar, in his book Baburnama. Ormuri, also called Birki at the time was one of the eleven to twelve tongues that were observed by Babar while in the region of Kabul. It is known that many of the Ormuri speakers are at least bilingual or trilingual, speaking other tribal languages such as Pashto, Persian, Dari, or Kaboli[3]
Pir Roshan (Bayazid Khan) was one of the first known Pashto prose writers and composers of Pashto alphabets who used several Ormuri words in his book "Khairul-Bayan." A few of the words that were used within his book were Nalattti (Pigs), Nmandzak of Mazdak (Mosque), Teshtan (Owner), Burghu (flout), Haramunai (ill-born), etc.
Research
Hikmatyar Burki has also done an MPhil on Ormuri and published his work through the Pashto Academy.[8]
There are two dialects of Ormuri; one is spoken in Kaniguram, Waziristan, which is the more archaic dialect, and the other one in Baraki-Barak, Logar. The Kaniguram dialect is not understood in Baraki-Barak. The linguist Georg Morgenstierne wrote:
While Kaniguram has borrowed freely from Waziri Pashto, the vocabulary of Logar has been influenced by other Pashto dialects, and, to a still greater extent, by Persian.[9]
The dialect of Kaniguram is currently strong, spoken by a relatively prosperous community of Ormur in an isolated part of the rugged Waziristan hills. However, the position of the dialect of Baraki Barak is not strong. Morgenstierne wrote he was told that:
Ormuri was no longer spoken in Baraki Barak, the ancient headquarters of the Ormur tribe. Even a man said to be from this village denied the existence of any other language than Persian and Pashto in his native place.[9]
The vowel system of Ormuri is characterized as heterogenous. The language consists of a subsystem of vowels that found native within Ormuri vocabulary, as well as a subsystem of vowels that is considered "borrowed vocabulary." The differences seen between the Logar and Kaniguram dialects are mainly based on the quality of vowels instead of the quantity.
The system is based on six phonemes: i, e, a, å, o, u.
Table 3: Differences in the phonetic form of consonants in Ormuri
The consonant system varies slightly between both the dialects of Kaniguram and Logar. The Logar native consonant system contains 25 phonemes, while the Kaniguram system has 27.
/t͡ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/ are uncommon in native vocabulary. In both dialects free variation of dental and postalveolar affricates is widespread. /r̝/ usually corresponds to /ʃ/ in Logar.
Ľubomír (2013) claims there is a voiceless retroflex non-sibilant fricative [ɻ̊˔].[10]
Proper Ormuri words will have the following syllabic patterns: V, VC, CV, CCV, (C)VCC, CVC, CCVC, CCVCC. Both dialects from Kaniguram and Logar have similar syllabic structure.
Examples
a- this
un/wun- so much
pe- father
gri- mountain
åxt- eight
måx- we
spok- dog
breš- burn
broxt- burned
wroxt- beard
At the end of certain words CC occurs as spirant/sonant + occlusive. When separating most words into syllables, a medial CC will be divided:
al-gox-tok- to fall
kir-ží- hen
er-zåk- to come
Morphology
The language has undergone extensive change in comparison to its ancestral self. For nominal morphology (nouns, adjectives, and pronouns), aspects of the Kaniguram dialect of grammatical gender has completely been lost in the Logar. In terms of the verbal morphology, there is a greater variety of conjugations of modal and tense-aspect forms based on the present-tense stem. There is also a distinction made between masculine and feminine words based on the past-tense system. Finally, there is a greater number of distinctions between within the system of tense-aspect forms and there are different types of ergative constructions.
There is a developed system of noun and verb inflections. Nominal parts of speech contains: Three numbers (singular, dual, and plural), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and the verb has two voices (active and middle). There is the elimination of the category of case (loss in nouns, adjectives, numerals, and certain pronouns). There is also a complete loss of the category of gender, varying on the dialect (Complete loss in Logar and rudimentary masculine and feminine forms remain in Kaniguram). In Logar most original Ormuri nouns and adjectives have a simple stem ending in a consonant and a few nouns end in unstressed (or rarely stressed) -a or -i. Whereas in Kaniguram, the stem usually ends in a consonant, but both nouns and adjectives may end in -a or -i.[6]
Orthography
Ormuri uses the Pashto script with the additional letters ڒ /r̝/ , ݫ /ʑ/ and ݭ /ɕ/ :
^ abDaniel G. Hallberg (1992) Pashto, Waneci, Ormuri (Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan, 4). National Institute of Pakistani Studies, 176 pp. ISBN969-8023-14-3.
^Novák, Ľubomír (2013). "Other Eastern Iranian Languages". Problem of Archaism and Innovation in the Eastern Iranian Languages (PhD). Prague: Charles University. p. 59.