Sardar Mohammad Khan

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Sardar Muhammad Khan

Sardar Muhammad Khan (1915 - 1998), known as SMK, was a renowned Indian researcher of Linguistics. He was born in a Pathan family at Basti Danishmandan (Jalandhar). After doing his secondary and higher secondary education, he did his B.A from the University of Punjab in 1934. He joined united Indian Army as a civilian employee and retired as a civilian gazetted officer from the G.H.Q, Rawalpindi in 1969. Being a government servant, under the rules, he could not publish any book until his retirement.

Sardar Muhammad Khan gave fifty years of his life to writing the largest Punjabi-Urdu dictionary in the history of Punjabi language. This dictionary, which is being published by the Pakistan Academy of Letters, consists of four volumes of thousand pages each. It has been written with a scholarly approach, and besides giving meanings and explanations of Punjabi words in Urdu, it also explains idioms, riddles, children's games, traditions, customs and religious terms. His love for dictionaries was evident from the fact that he remembered all the contents of Oxford Dictionary. He said, "it is the spelling that makes a dictionary: the pronunciation can differ from Peshawar to Sindh, but once you agree on a spelling, one word shall suffice for all."

He had a command of Arabic, English, Urdu and Persian and could write and speak in these languages fluently. He had thoroughly studied the Holy Quran and Islam and could speak in a scholarly manner on any aspects of this great religion with confidence . He also wrote a book on phonetics, "Aswatiat" in Urdu, which can be placed among the works of world class on this subject. It is a very specialized book. He got it printed in a small press that he himself ran.

He never did anything half-heartedly. His love for songs that brought him into the subjects of sounds/phonetics and dialects, forms the basis of his philological research in literature. This love made him a scholar of music and learn sing 'raags' (a kind of music) and play the sitar. He had a great passion for working on his family history. He worked very hard to give details of his ancestors' migration from one place to another with genealogy of the family of past three hundred years .