This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified. Please help improve this article if you can; the talk page may contain suggestions. (April 2009)

Potwari
Pothohari, Potowari, Potohari, Pahari-Pothohari پوٹھوهاری
Spoken in	Pakistan (northern Punjab and Azad Kashmir) Most migrant speakers in:  United Kingdom
Region	Pothohar region and Azad Kashmir
Native speakers	4,680,000 in Azad Kashmir, 3,250,000 in Rawalpindi, 1,000,000 in UK.  (date missing)
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan North-Western Zone Lahnda Potwari
Language codes
ISO 639-3	phr

Indo-Aryan languages, grouping according to SIL Ethnologue, Potwari is among the languages of the Northwestern zone:

  Central zone

  Northern zone

  Northwestern zone

  Eastern zone

  Southern zone

  Insular (Southern)

Potwari (پوٹھوهاری (Perso-Arabic), also known as Pothohari پوٹھواری or Pahari-Pothohari), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by inhabitants in the Pothohar Plateau in Pakistan and Azad Kashmir. Some of the cities includes Rawalpindi, Kahuta, Gujar Khan, Jehlum, parts of Gujrat in the south-west and Chakwal in the West, Hazara in the north and in Azad Kashmir in the east. A large overseas population of the language is found overseas in the UK. It is considered a transitional language between with similarities with the Lahnda languages, Pahari languages, Hindko and Punjabi, as spoken in Pakistan. Semi Dialects include Dhundi-Kairali, Chibhali, Mirpuri, Jhelumi, Pindiwali and Punchhi (Poonchi). Speakers of the language understand much of the Punjabi language, however the opposite is difficult in terms of comprehension. The word Paharai-Potwari is sometimes used, were the Pahari part is translated as 'mountain', referring to Azad Kashmir. There are slight variations in the vocabulary with regards to the Potwari speakers of the west on the Potohar plateau and the speakers on the east in Azad Kashmir.

Typical Potohar scenery with 'pahar' backdrop

Written Potwari[link]

Written Potwari is based on a variety of stansted dialect of northern Lanhda as wriiten by Sir Geroge Gierson in his LSI. It is widely spoken in the northern parts of Pakistan and in Kashmir, significant places are Rawalpindi and Mirpur. It is semi-officially written and Perso-Arabic standardised orthography is utilised. Speakers literate in Urdu often write mostly in Perso-Arabic style and do not sometimes regard Potwari as a literary language. When in some cases Potwari is written, the Perso-Arabic orthography is utilised or it is written in Roman Potwari, which is used for the writing of Urdu in Roman script. This is largely the case in the UK where a large percentage of Pahari-Potohari speakers reside, who are found to constitute the majority of the expatriate Pakistani (from the Potohar plateau e.g Gujar Khan, Rawalpindi, Kahuta etc.) and Jammu & Kashmiri community. Pahari-Potohari is widely spoken and is used in many traditional poetry due to its richness, the most famous of which is by the poet Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, whose poetry is still performed and enjoyed to this present day in Punjab region and Azad Kashmir. Potwari is an interestingly unique dialect that has some resemblance and close relations to Punjabi, but more interestingly has Pashto/Hindko inflections to the soundings of the words.

It is not the case that Potwari has never been written; during the Buddhist reign Potwari was written using the Laṇḍā script which evolved from the Sharada script. Sharada was invented in the Buddhist university of the same name located in the Neelam Valley in modern day Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Presently, the Perso-Arabic script is standard and has been since the Mughal rule. Potwari has a rich oral tradition, which has been passed down from generation to generation and is used in many famous poetry. This is by in large due to the rampant illiteracy in the communities that uses Potwari as their dialect, which may be due to labour trends/tradition, personal choice or lack of facilities and establishments in the past.

Pahari is also a term used for a language in the Himachal Pradesh region of Northern India. It must be noted that the Pahari-Potohari language is incomprehensible with this dialect.

Dialects[link]

Potwari as a dialect of Punjabi has many different varieties and many different sub-dialects, They include :

-Poonchi -Muree (Named after the Muree hills which surround Rawalpindi & Islamabad) -Mirpuri

The above dialects are the main dialects within the Potwari "language" or dialect, each of the dialects vary in vocabulary and pronunciation. Some varieties of potwari can be more closer to proper Punjabi or standardized Punjabi which is based on the dialect of Lahore. The Mirpuri dialect in particular shares more in common with standardized Punjabi, where as the Muree and Poonchi dialects are more divergent are more different from mirpuri, Poonchi and Muree are spoken around Rawalpindi and Jhelum such as Dina which is in the Jhelum district

Modern Potwari Arts[link]

Potwari has a rich tradition of sung poetry recital accompanied by Sitar, Tabla, Harmonium and Dholak, these poems are called Sher and are often highly lyrical and somewhat humorous and secular in nature, although there are plenty of religious sher. Please see below in the references section for a famous Potohari sher, 'Saif-ul-Malook'

Examples[link]

Popular Phrases (Comparison with Punjabi)[link]

Pronunciation[link]

Vowels:

Aspirated consonants:

All consonants followed by a 'h' are aspirated, that is a puff of air follows the sound of the consonant, not aspirating the consonant alters the meaning of the word. E.g. 'tu' and 'thu' have different meanings (you and from respectively). A vowel followed by 'ṇ' is nasalised.

See also[link]

• Indo-Aryan Languages

References[link]

Examples of spoken Pahari-Potwari:

Main Julian England - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0xwm5kbUAk

Nikammay Babu - http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=nqDMtiHZKgg

Mirpuri Boyz - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gSDxwv3NaQ

Muzaffarabad Pahari Poetry - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqqQYUMlBY8

Famous Potohari Sher sung by a Gujrati:

Saif-ul-Malook - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M8TGe4a1KM

External links[link]

• Miki Kharo England - GeoPakistani
• Pahari.org
• Jumtree.co.uk, examples of Potwari Sher (sung poetry)

Potwari language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

v t e Languages of Pakistan Official languages Urdu English Provincial languages Punjabi Pashto Sindhi Balochi Regional languages Brahui Chitrali Dari Hindko Kashmiri Persian Potwari Saraiki Shina Related topics Dardic languages Iranic languages Indo-Aryan Languages Pakistani Sign Language Arabic

John Hanson
Portrait of John Hanson, attributed to John Hesselius, c. late 1760s
9th President of the Continental Congress
In office November 5, 1781 – November 3, 1782
Preceded by	Thomas McKean
Succeeded by	Elias Boudinot
Personal details
Born	(1721-04-14)April 14, 1721 near Port Tobacco, Maryland
Died	November 22, 1783(1783-11-22) (aged 62) Prince George's County, Maryland
Signature

John Hanson (April 14, 1721^[1] – November 22, 1783) was a merchant and public official from Maryland during the era of the American Revolution. After serving in a variety of roles for the Patriot cause in Maryland, in 1779 Hanson was elected as a delegate to the Continental Congress. He signed the Articles of Confederation in 1781 after Maryland finally joined the other states in ratifying them. In November 1781, he was the first person to be elected as the presiding officer, leading some historians to claim he was the first President of the United States.^[2] Stiverson (2000) states that Hanson was little more than the first among equals in Congress and had no executive power. His duties were largely ceremonial, and his correct title was President of the Continental Congress.^[3]

Early life[link]

John Hanson, Jr.^[3] was born at "Mulberry Grove" in Port Tobacco Parish in Charles County in the British Province of Maryland. The American National Biography lists Hanson's birth date as April 3, 1721,^[3] which in the modern calendar system is equivalent to April 14, although the older Dictionary of American Biography gives the date as April 13, 1721.^[4] Some older sources list a birth year of 1715. Hanson's parents were Samuel and Elizabeth (Story) Hanson.^[3] Samuel Hanson was a planter who owned more than 1,000 acres (4.0 km²),^[3] and held a variety of political offices, including serving two terms in the Maryland General Assembly.^[4]

John Hanson was of English ancestry; his grandfather, also named John, came to Charles County, Maryland, as an indentured servant around 1661.^[5] In 1876, a writer named George Hanson placed John Hanson in his family tree of Swedish Americans descended from four Swedish brothers who emigrated to New Sweden in 1642.^[5][6] This story was often repeated over the next century, but scholarly research in the late 20th century suggested that John Hanson was of English heritage and not related to these Swedish American Hansons.^[7][8]

Hanson had no extended formal education while growing up in Maryland, but he read broadly in both English and Latin. He followed the family tradition as a planter, extending and improving his holdings. About 1744 he married Jane Contee, with whom he would have eight children.^[3] Their son Alexander Contee Hanson, Sr. (1749–1806) was a notable essayist.^[9] Alexander Hanson is sometimes confused with his son, Alexander Contee Hanson, Jr. (1786–1819), who became a newspaper editor and US Senator.

Political career[link]

Hanson's career in public service began in 1750, when he was appointed sheriff of Charles County.^[3] In 1757 he was elected to represent Charles County in the lower house of the Maryland General Assembly, where he served over the next twelve years, sitting on many important committees.^[3] Maryland was a proprietary colony, and Hanson aligned himself with the "popular" or "country" party, which opposed any expansion of the power of the proprietary governors at the expense of the popularly elected lower house. He was a leading opponent of the 1765 Stamp Act, chairing the committee that drafted the instructions for Maryland's delegates to the Stamp Act Congress. In protest of the Townshend Acts, in 1769 Hanson was one of the signers of a nonimportation resolution that boycotted British imports until the acts were repealed.^[3]

Hanson changed course in 1769, apparently to better pursue his business interests. He resigned from the General Assembly, sold his land in Charles County, and moved to Frederick County in western Maryland. There he held a variety of offices, including deputy surveyor, sheriff, and county treasurer.^[3]

When relations between Great Britain and the colonies became a crisis in 1774, Hanson became one of Frederick County's leading Patriots. He chaired a town meeting that passed a resolution opposing the Boston Port Act.^[3] In 1775, he was a delegate to the Maryland Convention, an extralegal body convened after the colonial assembly had been prorogued. With the other delegates, he signed the Association of Freemen on July 26, 1775, which expressed hope for reconciliation with Great Britain, but also called for military resistance to enforcement of the Intolerable Acts.^[4]

With hostilities underway, Hanson chaired the Frederick County committee of observation, part of the Patriot organization that assumed control of local governance. Responsible for recruiting and arming soldiers, Hanson proved to be an excellent organizer, and Frederick County sent the first southern troops to join George Washington's army.^[3]

Hanson was elected to the newly reformed Maryland House of Delegates in 1777, the first of five annual terms.^[3] In December 1779, the House of Delegates named Hanson as one of its delegates to the Second Continental Congress. He began those duties when he took his seat in Philadelphia on June 14, 1780, serving until 1782. While Hanson was in Congress, the Articles of Confederation were at last ratified by all the states. When the Congress received notice of this on March 1, 1781, he joined Daniel Carroll in endorsing them for Maryland.

President of Congress[link]

The bronze statue that stands in the United States Capitol

In November 1781, Hanson became the first President of the Continental Congress to be elected for an annual term as specified in the Articles of Confederation,^[3] although Samuel Huntington and Thomas McKean had served in that office after the ratification of the Articles. Under the Articles of Confederation, the United States had no executive branch; the President of Congress was a mostly ceremonial position within the Confederation Congress, but the office did require Hanson to handle a good deal of correspondence and sign official documents.^[10] Hanson found the work tedious and wished to resign, but his departure would have left Congress without a quorum to select a successor, and so, out of a sense of duty, he remained in office.^[3]

Because Hanson was the first president elected under the Articles of Confederation, one of his grandsons later promoted him as the first President of the United States.^[11][12] This ultimately resulted in Hanson's statue being one of two representing Maryland in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, even though, according to historian Gregory Stiverson, Hanson was not one of Maryland's foremost leaders of the Revolutionary era.^[3] The idea that Hanson was the forgotten first President of the United States was further promoted in a 1932 biography of Hanson by journalist Seymour Wemyss Smith.^[13] Smith's book asserts that the American Revolution had two primary leaders: George Washington in the military sphere, and John Hanson in politics.^[14] This idea is sometimes paired with the claim that Hanson was actually a black man, using a photograph of Senator John Hanson of Liberia to support the claim.^[15]

Death and legacy[link]

Hanson retired from public office after his one-year term as President of Congress. In poor health, he died a year later at his nephew's plantation Oxon Hill Manor in Prince George's County, Maryland, on November 22, 1783.The grave site has been lost.^{[citation needed]}

Maryland law specifies that "the Governor annually shall proclaim April 13 as John Hanson's birthday and dedicate that day to the statesman."^[16][17] Also, U.S. Route 50 between Washington D.C. and Annapolis is named the John Hanson Highway in his honor. There are also middle schools located in Oxon Hill, Maryland, and Waldorf, Maryland, named after him. A former savings bank named for him was merged in the 1990s with Industrial Bank of Washington, D.C. A namesake, John Hanson Briscoe, was a circuit judge and Speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates.

In 1903 the state of Maryland donated a bronze statue by Richard E. Brooks to the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall Collection. It is currently located on the 2nd floor of the Senate connecting corridor. A maquette of the Hanson statue by Brooks resides on the President's dais in the Senate Chamber of the Maryland State House.^[18]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

Scholarly

• Levering, Ralph B. "John Hanson, Public Servant". Maryland Historical Magazine 71 (Summer 1976): 113–33.
• Papenfuse, Edward C., et al. A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635–1789. 1:405-6. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-8018-1995-4.
• Russel, George Ely. "John Hanson of Maryland: A Swedish Heritage Disproved". The American Genealogist 63, no. 4 (October 1988).

Popular

• Kremer, J. Bruce. John Hanson of Mulberry Grove. New York: A. & C. Boni, 1938.
• Nelson, Jacob A. John Hanson and the inseparable union: an authentic biography of a revolutionary leader, patriot and statesman. Boston: Meador Publishing Company, 1939.
• Smith, Seymour Wemyss. John Hanson, our first president. New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932.
• Thomas, Douglas H. John Hanson, President of the United States in Congress Assembled, 1781–1782. 1898. According to the American National Biography, the biographies of Hanson are not "adequate," though this is one, written by Hanson's grandson, is "perhaps the most satisfactory" of the lot.

External links[link]

• John Hanson at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Hanson at Snopes.com

v t e Signers of the Articles of Confederation A. Adams · S. Adams · T. Adams · Banister · Bartlett · Carroll · Clingan · Collins · Dana · Dickinson · Drayton · Duane · Duer · Ellery · Gerry · Hancock · Hanson · Harnett · Harvie · Heyward · Holten · Hosmer · Huntington · Hutson · Langworthy · Laurens · F. Lee · R. Lee · Lewis · Lovell · Marchant · Mathews · McKean · G. Morris · R. Morris · Penn · Reed · Roberdeau · Scudder · Sherman · Smith · Telfair · Van Dyke · Walton · Wentworth · Williams · Witherspoon · Wolcott