Tocharian languages

The Tocharian (sometimes Tokharian) languages ( , ), also known as the Agni-Kuči, Agnean-Kuchean or Kuchean-Agnean languages, are an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family spoken by inhabitants of the Tarim Basin, the Tocharians. The languages are known from manuscripts dating from the 5th to the 8th century AD, which were found in oasis cities on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin (now part of Xinjiang in Northwest China) and the Lop Desert. The discovery of these languages in the early 20th century contradicted the formerly prevalent idea of an east–west division of the Indo-European language family as centum and satem languages, and prompted reinvigorated study of the Indo-European family. Scholars studying these manuscripts in the early 20th century identified their authors with the Tokharoi, a name used in ancient sources for people of Bactria (Tokharistan). Although this identification is now believed to be mistaken, "Tocharian" remains the usual term for these languages.

The oldest extant manuscripts in Tocharian B are now dated to the fifth or even late fourth century AD, making it a language of late antiquity contemporary with Gothic, Classical Armenian, and Primitive Irish.

Discovery and significance

thumb|350px|upright=1.5|The geographical spread of [[Indo-European languages]]

The existence of the Tocharian languages and alphabet was not even suspected until archaeological exploration of the Tarim Basin by Aurel Stein in the early 20th century brought to light fragments of manuscripts in an unknown language, dating from the 6th to 8th centuries AD.

It soon became clear that these fragments were actually written in two distinct but related languages belonging to a hitherto unknown branch of Indo-European, now known as Tocharian:

Tocharian A (Turfanian, Agnean, or East Tocharian; natively ) of Qarašähär (ancient Agni, Chinese Yanqi and Sanskrit Agni) and Turpan (ancient Turfan and Xočo), and
Tocharian B (Kuchean or West Tocharian) of Kucha and Tocharian A sites.

Prakrit documents from 3rd-century Krorän and Niya on the southeast edge of the Tarim Basin contain loanwords and names that appeared to scholars to come from a closely related language, referred to as Tocharian C. However, this was found to be entirely flawed for the Krorän part (see below, section "Tocharian C"). Recently, a dissertation authored by Niels Schoubben (Leiden University) has demonstrated that all the so-called Tocharian loanwords in Niya Prakrit were, in fact, Bactrian and pre-Bactrian loanwords, or resulted from fundamental misunderstandings of specific words and orthographies. His work definitively put an end to the "Tocharian C" hypothesis.

The discovery of Tocharian upset some theories about the relations of Indo-European languages and revitalized their study. In the 19th century, it was thought that the division between centum and satem languages was a simple west–east division, with centum languages in the west. The theory was undermined in the early 20th century by the discovery of Hittite, a centum language in a relatively eastern location, and Tocharian, which was a centum language despite being the easternmost branch. The result was a new hypothesis, following the wave model of Johannes Schmidt, suggesting that the satem isogloss represents a linguistic innovation in the central part of the Proto-Indo-European home range, and the centum languages along the eastern and the western peripheries did not undergo that change.

Most scholars identify the ancestors of the Tocharians with the Afanasievo culture of South Siberia ( 3300–2500 BC), an early eastern offshoot of the steppe cultures of the Don-Volga area that later became the Yamnayans. Under this scenario, Tocharian speakers would have immigrated to the Tarim Basin from the north at some later point.

Most scholars reject Walter Bruno Henning's proposed link to Gutian, a language spoken on the Iranian plateau in the 22nd century BC and known only from personal names.

Tocharian probably died out after 840 when the Uyghurs, expelled from Mongolia by the Kyrgyz, moved into the Tarim Basin.

Names

thumb|upright|[[Tocharians|Tocharian royal family (King, Queen and young blond-haired Princes), Kizil, Cave 17 (entrance wall, lower left panel). Hermitage Museum.]]

A colophon to a Central Asian Buddhist manuscript from the late 8th century states that it was translated into Old Turkic from Sanskrit, via a twγry language. In 1907, Emil Sieg and Friedrich W. K. Müller proposed that twγry was a name for the newly-discovered language of the Turpan area.

Sieg and Müller, reading this name as toxrï, connected it with the ethnonym Tócharoi (, Ptolemy VI, 11, 6, 2nd century AD), itself taken from Indo-Iranian (cf. Old Persian tuxāri-, Khotanese ttahvāra, and Sanskrit tukhāra), and proposed the name "Tocharian" (German Tocharisch). Ptolemy's Tócharoi are often associated by modern scholars with the Yuezhi of Chinese historical accounts, who founded the Kushan Empire. It is now clear that these people actually spoke Bactrian, an Eastern Iranian language, rather than the language of the Tarim manuscripts, so the term "Tocharian" is considered a misnomer. Nevertheless, it remains the standard term for the language of the Tarim Basin manuscripts.

In 1938, Walter Bruno Henning found the term "four twγry" used in early 9th-century manuscripts in Sogdian, Middle Iranian, and Uighur. He argued that it referred to the region on the northeast edge of the Tarim, including Agni and Karakhoja, but not Kucha. He thus inferred that the colophon referred to the Agnean language.

Although the term twγry or toxrï appears to be the Old Turkic name for the Tocharians, it is not found in Tocharian texts. but this name has not achieved widespread usage.

Classification

Tocharian A and B

thumb|upright=1.5|Tocharian languages A (blue), B (red) and C (green) in the Tarim Basin. Tarim oasis towns are given as listed in the [[Book of Han ( 2nd century BC), with the areas of the squares proportional to population.]]

Tocharian A and B are significantly different, to the point of being mutually unintelligible. A common Proto-Tocharian language must precede the attested languages by several centuries, probably dating to the late 1st millennium BC.

Tocharian A is found only in the eastern part of the Tocharian-speaking area, and all extant texts are of a religious nature. Tocharian B, however, is found throughout the range and in both religious and secular texts. As a result, it has been suggested that Tocharian A was a liturgical language, no longer spoken natively, while Tocharian B was the spoken language of the entire area.

Tocharian C

A third Tocharian language was first suggested by Thomas Burrow in the 1930s, while discussing 3rd-century documents from Krorän (Loulan) and Niya. The texts were written in Gandhari Prakrit, but contained loanwords of evidently Tocharian origin, such as kilme ('district'), ṣoṣthaṃga ('tax collector'), and ṣilpoga ('document'). This hypothetical language later became generally known as Tocharian C. It has also sometimes been called Kroränian or Krorainic.

In papers published posthumously in 2018, Klaus T. Schmidt, a scholar of Tocharian, presented a decipherment of 10 texts written in the Kharoṣṭhī script. Schmidt claimed that these texts were written in a third Tocharian language he called . He also suggested that the language was closer to Tocharian B than to Tocharian A.

In 2024, Schoubben conducted a systematic review of Niya Prakrit and the loanwords claimed as evidence for Tocharian C. He argued that most of the words in question could be explained as loanwords from Bactrian or other Iranian languages, and found no compelling evidence for a Tocharian substrate. For example, Burrow proposed that aṃklatsa, 'a type of camel', corresponded to Tocharian A āknats and Tocharian B aknātsa 'stupid, foolish', believing that this would refer to an 'untrained camel', from a Tocharian form *anknats (with the negative prefix *en-). Not only does this etymology presuppose an ad hoc sound change from *-nkn- to *-nkl-, but the variant agiltsa also found in Niya becomes aberrant. Schoubben suggests that this might be a Bactrian word, as camels originally come from Bactria, but could not find a convincing etymology. He had earlier argued that <ḱ> was used in Niya Prakrit to transcribe Bactrian -šk- (spelled ϸκ in the Bactrian alphabet). For example, Burrow had tentatively connected maḱa, a Niya Prakrit word for an unidentified food produced on farms, with Tocharian A malke 'milk', but Schoubben derives it from Proto-Iranian *māšaka- 'bean'.

Phonology

Phonetically, Tocharian languages are "centum" Indo-European languages, meaning that they merge the palatovelar consonants () of Proto-Indo-European with the plain velars () rather than palatalizing them to affricates or sibilants. Centum languages are mostly found in western and southern Europe (Greek, Italic, Celtic, Germanic). In that sense Tocharian (to some extent like the Greek and the Anatolian languages) seems to have been an isolate in the "satem" (i.e. palatovelar to sibilant) phonetic regions of Indo-European-speaking populations. The discovery of Tocharian contributed to doubts that Proto-Indo-European had originally split into western and eastern branches; today, the centum–satem division is not seen as a real familial division.

Vowels

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"

! Front

! Central

! Back

! Close

| i

| ä

| u

! Mid

| e

| a

| o

! Open

| ā

Tocharian A and Tocharian B have the same set of vowels, but they often do not correspond to each other. For example, the sound a did not occur in Proto-Tocharian. Tocharian B a is derived from former stressed ä or unstressed ā (reflected unchanged in Tocharian A), while Tocharian A a stems from Proto-Tocharian or (reflected as and in Tocharian B), and Tocharian A e and o stem largely from monophthongization of former diphthongs (still present in Tocharian B).

Diphthongs

Diphthongs occur in Tocharian B only.

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"

! Closer component is front

! Closer component is back

! Opener component is unrounded

| ai

| au āu

! Opener component is rounded

| oy

Consonants

thumb|upright=1.5|Wooden tablet with an inscription showing Tocharian B in its Brahmic form. [[Kucha, Xinjiang, 5th–8th century (Tokyo National Museum)]]

The following table lists the reconstructed phonemes in Tocharian along with their standard transcription. Because Tocharian is written in an alphabet used originally for Sanskrit and its descendants, the transcription reflects Sanskrit phonology, and may not represent Tocharian phonology accurately. The Tocharian alphabet also has letters representing all of the remaining Sanskrit sounds, but these appear only in Sanskrit loanwords and are not thought to have had distinct pronunciations in Tocharian. There is some uncertainty as to actual pronunciation of some of the letters, particularly those representing palatalized obstruents (see below).

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"

! Bilabial

! Alveolar

! Alveolo-palatal

! Palatal

! Velar

!| Plosive

| p

| t

| k

!| Affricate

| ts

| c ?2

!| Fricative

| s

| ś

|  ṣ ?3

!| Nasal

| m

| n 1

| ñ

| ṅ 4

!| Trill

| r

!| Approximant

| y

|  w

!| Lateral approximant

| l

| ly

is transcribed by two different letters in the Tocharian alphabet depending on position. Based on the corresponding letters in Sanskrit, these are transcribed (word-finally, including before certain clitics) and n (elsewhere), but represents , not .
The sound written is thought to correspond to a alveolo-palatal affricate in Sanskrit. The Tocharian pronunciation is suggested by the common occurrence of the cluster śc, but the exact pronunciation cannot be determined with certainty.
The sound written seems more likely to have been a palato-alveolar sibilant (as in English "ship"), because it derives from a palatalized .
The sound ṅ occurs only before k, or in some clusters where a k has been deleted between consonants. It is clearly phonemic because sequences nk and ñk also exist (from syncope of a former ä between them).

Writing system

thumb|upright=1.5|

Tocharian is documented in manuscript fragments, mostly from the 8th century (with a few earlier ones) that were written on palm leaves, wooden tablets, and Chinese paper, preserved by the extremely dry climate of the Tarim Basin. Samples of the language have been discovered at sites in Kucha and Karasahr, including many mural inscriptions.

Most of attested Tocharian was written in the Tocharian alphabet, a derivative of the Brahmi alphabetic syllabary (abugida) also referred to as North Turkestan Brahmi or slanting Brahmi. However, a smaller amount was written in the Manichaean script in which Manichaean texts were recorded. It soon became apparent that a large proportion of the manuscripts were translations of known Buddhist works in Sanskrit and some of them were even bilingual, facilitating decipherment of the new language. Besides the Buddhist and Manichaean religious texts, there were also monastery correspondence and accounts, commercial documents, caravan permits, medical and magical texts, and one love poem.

In 1998, the Chinese linguist Ji Xianlin published a translation and analysis of fragments of a Tocharian Maitreyasamiti-Nataka discovered in 1974 in Yanqi.

Morphology

Nouns

Tocharian has completely re-worked the nominal declension system of Proto-Indo-European. The only cases inherited from the proto-language are nominative, genitive, accusative, and (in Tocharian B only) vocative; in Tocharian the old accusative is known as the oblique case. In addition to these primary cases, however, each Tocharian language has six cases formed by the addition of an invariant suffix to the oblique case — although the set of six cases is not the same in each language, and the suffixes are largely non-cognate. For example, the Tocharian word ' (Toch B), ' (Toch A) "horse" < PIE *eḱwos is declined as follows: Greek Plátōn literally "the broad-shouldered one" < platús "broad". Some examples: athematic and thematic present tenses, including null-, -y-, -sḱ-, -s-, -n- and -nH- suffixes as well as n-infixes and various laryngeal-ending stems; o-grade and possibly lengthened-grade perfects (although lacking reduplication or augment); sigmatic, reduplicated, thematic, and possibly lengthened-grade aorists; optatives; imperatives; and possibly PIE subjunctives.

In addition, most PIE sets of endings are found in some form in Tocharian (although with significant innovations), including thematic and athematic endings, primary (non-past) and secondary (past) endings, active and mediopassive endings, and perfect endings. Dual endings are still found, although they are rarely attested and generally restricted to the third person. The mediopassive still reflects the distinction between primary -r and secondary -i, effaced in most Indo-European languages. Both root and suffix ablaut is still well-represented, although again with significant innovations.

Contact with other languages

Michaël Peyrot argues that several of the most striking typological peculiarities of Tocharian are rooted in a prolonged contact of Proto-Tocharian with an early stage of Proto-Samoyedic in South Siberia. This might explain the merger of all three stop series (e.g. *t, *d, *dʰ > *t), which must have led to a huge number of homonyms, restructuring of the vowel system, development of agglutinative case marking, the loss of the dative case, and others.

In historic times, the Tocharian language stood in contact with various surrounding languages, including Iranian, Turkic, and Sinitic languages. Tocharian borrowings, and other Indo-European loanwords transmitted to Uralic, Turkic and Sinitic speakers, have been confirmed. Tocharian had a high social position within the region, and influenced the Turkic languages, which would later replace Tocharian in the Tarim Basin.

Sample text

Most of the texts known from the Tocharians are religious, but one noted text is a fragment of a love poem in Tocharian B (manuscript B-496, found in Kizil):

{| class="wikitable centre"

|+ Tocharian B manuscript B-496

! scope="col" align=left| Translation (English)!!Transliteration!!Inscription (Tocharian script)

|align=center |

| align=left |