Tocharian languages


The Tocharian '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 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. Although this identification is now believed to be mistaken, "Tocharian" remains the usual term for these languages.
The discovered manuscripts record two closely related languages, called Tocharian A and Tocharian B. The subject matter of the texts suggests that Tocharian A was more archaic and used as a Buddhist liturgical language, while Tocharian B was more actively spoken in the entire area from Turfan in the east to Tumshuq in the west. A body of loanwords and names found in Prakrit documents from the Lop Nur basin have been dubbed Tocharian C. A claimed find of ten Tocharian C texts written in Kharosthi has been discredited.
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

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:
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. Recently, a dissertation authored by Niels Schoubben 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, 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. The theory is supported by the discovery of translations of Tocharian texts into Uyghur.
Some modern Chinese words may ultimately derive from a Tocharian or related source, e.g. Old Chinese *mjit "honey", from Proto-Tocharian *ḿət, cognate with Old Church Slavonic медъ , and English .

Names

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, itself taken from Indo-Iranian, and proposed the name "Tocharian". 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.
The apparent self-designation ārśi appears in Tocharian A texts. Tocharian B texts use the adjective kuśiññe, derived from kuśi or kuči, a name also known from Chinese and Turkic documents. The historian Bernard Sergent compounded these names to coin an alternative term Arśi-Kuči for the family, recently revised to Agni-Kuči, but this name has not achieved widespread usage.

Writing system

Tocharian is documented in manuscript fragments, mostly from the 8th century 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 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.

Tocharian A and B

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.
The hypothesized relationship of Tocharian A and B as liturgical and spoken forms, respectively, is sometimes compared with the relationship between Latin and the modern Romance languages, or Classical Chinese and Mandarin. However, in both of these latter cases, the liturgical language is the linguistic ancestor of the spoken language, whereas no such relationship holds between Tocharian A and B. In fact, from a phonological perspective Tocharian B is significantly more conservative than Tocharian A, and serves as the primary source for reconstructing Proto-Tocharian. Only Tocharian B preserves the following Proto-Tocharian features: stress distinctions, final vowels, diphthongs, and o vs. e distinction. In turn, the loss of final vowels in Tocharian A has led to the loss of certain Proto-Tocharian categories still found in Tocharian B, e.g. the vocative case and some of the noun, verb, and adjective declensional classes.
In their declensional and conjugational endings, the two languages innovated in divergent ways, with neither clearly simpler than the other. For example, both languages show significant innovations in the present active indicative endings but in radically different ways, so that only the second-person singular ending is directly cognate between the two languages, and in most cases neither variant is directly cognate with the corresponding Proto-Indo-European form. The agglutinative secondary case endings in the two languages likewise stem from different sources, showing parallel development of the secondary case system after the Proto-Tocharian period. Likewise, some of the verb classes show independent origins, e.g. the class II preterite, which uses reduplication in Tocharian A but long PIE ē in Tocharian B.
Tocharian B shows an internal chronological development; three linguistic stages have been detected. The oldest stage is attested only in Kucha. There are also the middle and the late stage.