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Tocharian
fragment in Tocharian B
Region	Tarim Basin in Central Asia
Extinct	Ninth century AD
Language family	Indo-European Tocharian
Writing system	Tocharian script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Either: xto – Tocharian A txb – Tocharian B
Linguist List	xto Tocharian A
	txb Tocharian B
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Tocharian or Tokharian (/təˈkɛəriən/ or /təˈkɑːriən/) is an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family, formerly spoken in oases on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin (now part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China). Two branches of Tocharian are known from documents dating from the 3rd to 9th centuries AD:

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

Prakrit documents from 3rd century Kroran on the southeast edge of the Tarim Basin contain loanwords and names that appear to come from another variety of Tocharian, dubbed Tocharian C. All these languages became extinct after Uyghur tribes expanded into the area.

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.

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. The discovery of Tocharian upset some theories about the relations of Indo-European languages and revitalized their study.

Prior to the discovery of Tocharian, it was thought that the division between Centum and Satem languages was a simple west–east division, with Centum languages in the west. The Tocharian languages are a major geographic exception, however, as they are the easternmost branch but nonetheless belong to the Centum division. The contemporary identification of the Anatolian branch, also Centum but in a relatively eastern location, further muddied the picture. The result was a new hypothesis, following the "wave" theory of Johannes Schmidt, suggesting that the Satem isogloss represents a linguistic innovation in the central part of the Proto-Indo-European home range, where the Centum languages are simply the linguistically conservative remainder, found along the eastern and western peripheries.

Tocharian probably died out after 840 when the Uyghurs, expelled from Mongolia by the Kyrgyz, retreated to the Tarim Basin. This theory is supported by the discovery of translations of Tocharian texts into Uyghur. During Uyghur rule, the peoples mixed with the Uyghurs to produce much of the modern population of what is now Xinjiang.

The Afanasevo culture is a strong candidate for being the earliest attested representative for speakers of the Tocharian languages.

Name

A colophon to a Buddhist manuscript in Old Turkish states that it was translated from Sanskrit via a language called twγry, read as toxrï by Friedrich W. K. Müller in 1907 who guessed it was the newly discovered language of the Turpan area. He further connected this toxrï with the ethnonym Tócharoi (Template:Lang-grc, Ptolemy VI, 11, 6, 2nd cent. 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 Tocharian language. Nevertheless "Tocharian" remains the standard term for the language of the Tarim Basin manuscripts.

The term toxrï does appear to be the Old Turkic name for the Tocharians. However, this term is not used in the Tocharian languages themselves. Tocharian A appears to use the self-designation ārśi, while in Tocharian B is found adjectival kuśiññe, derived from kuśi (also kuci), the name of a dynasty and state also known from Chinese documents. Bernard Sergent has proposed the name Agni-Kuči (formerly Arśi-Kuči) for the group.

Writing system

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 the script in Tocharian was a derivative of the Brahmi alphabetic syllabary (abugida) and is referred to as 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, 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, although it is unclear whether they were mutually intelligible. A common Proto-Tocharian language must precede the attested languages by several centuries, probably dating to the 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. (On the other hand, it is possible that the lack of a secular corpus in Tocharian A is simply an accident, due to the smaller distribution of the language and the fragmentary preservation of Tocharian texts in general.)

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 terms of declensional and conjugational endings, the two languages have tended to innovate 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 PIE 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 (possibly from the reduplicated aorist) but long PIE ē in Tocharian B (possibly from the long-vowel perfect found in Latin lēgī, fēcī, etc.).

Phonemes

Phonetically, Tocharian is a "centum" Indo-European language, meaning that it merges the palatovelar consonants (*ḱ, *ǵ, *ǵʰ) of Proto Indo-European with the plain velars (*k, *g, *gʰ). Centum languages are mostly found in western and southern Europe (Greek, Italic, Celtic, Germanic) and the number of isoglosses between Tocharian and several Western European languages is stunning, considering the geographical separation and total lack of cultural contact. 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.

Vowels

Note that, although both Tocharian A and Tocharian B have the same set of vowels, they often don't 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 /ɛ/ or /ɔ/ (reflected as /e/ and /o/ 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.

Consonants

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 of the sounds is directly based on the transcription of the corresponding Sanskrit sounds. 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).

1. /n/ is transcribed ṃ word-finally, because it is represented in the Tocharian alphabet using a special symbol corresponding to Sanskrit ṃ.
2. The sound written c is thought to correspond to a palatal stop /c/ in Sanskrit. The Tocharian pronunciation /tɕ/ is suggested by the common occurrence of the cluster śc, but the exact pronunciation cannot be determined with certainty.
3. The sound written ṣ corresponds to retroflex sibilant /ʂ/ in Sanskrit, but it seems more likely to have been a palato-alveolar sibilant /ʃ/ (as in English "ship"), because it derives from a palatalized /s/.
4. The sound /ŋ/ occurs only before /k/, or in some clusters where a /k/ has been deleted between consonants.

Proto-Tocharian

Vowels

Proto-Tocharian had a different vowel system from either Tocharian A or B:

(It is unclear whether a mid-front vowel /e/ existed separate from a lower front vowel /ɛ/. Adams reconstructs /e/ (< PIE /eː/) separately from /ɛ/ (< PIE /o/) based on the supposed operation of certain Proto-Tocharian umlaut processes, but this is a minority position.)

Proto-Tocharian shows radical changes in its vowels from Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Length distinctions eventually disappeared, but prior to that all pairs of long and short vowels had become distinct in quality, and thus have different outcomes. Many pairs of PIE vowels are distinguished in Tocharian only by the occurrence or non-occurrence of palatalization. For example, PIE o and ē both evolved into Proto-Tocharian ë /ɛ/, but PIE ē palatalized the preceding consonant, and left a y when no consonant preceded, while neither of these occurs with PIE o. As a general rule, Tocharian B reflects the Proto-Tocharian vowel system fairly faithfully, while Tocharian A contains significantly more changes, including monophthongization of diphthongs, loss of all absolutely final vowels, loss of ä in open syllables, and epenthesis of ä to break up difficult clusters (esp. word-finally) that resulted from vowel losses.

Proto-Tocharian also had phonemic stress, which is not indicated in the writing system but revealed by the differing outcomes of Proto-Tocharian ä and ā in Tocharian B depending whether or not they bore stress. For the most part, Proto-Tocharian stress does not reflect PIE stress. For example, bisyllabic words in Proto-Tocharian have consistent initial stress, and trisyllabic and longer words usually have stress on the second syllable. A number of multisyllabic words in Tocharian B appear to indicate that more than one syllable was stressed; it is thought that these reflect clitics or affixes that still behaved phonologically as separate words in Proto-Tocharian.

A number of umlaut processes occurred in the Proto-Tocharian period, which tended to increase the number of rounded vowels. Vowel rounding also resulted from the influence of nearby labiovelars, although this occurred after the Proto-Tocharian period, which differing results in Tocharian A and B, generally with more rounding in Tocharian A (e.g. PIE *gʷṃ- "come" > PToch *kʷäm- > Tocharian A kum- but Tocharian B käm-).

The following table shows the changes from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) to Proto-Tocharian (PToch) and on to Tocharian B (TB) and Tocharian A (TA):

Notes:

1. The last six lines indicate umlaut processes that operated during the Proto-Tocharian period.
2. A + sign indicates palatalization. When following a consonant, that consonant is palatalized; otherwise, a y appears. With PIE i, only dentals are generally palatalized; this is indicated as (+).
3. A — sign indicates no vowel; this results from deletion of ä in open syllables.
4. Tocharian B reflects Proto-Tocharian central vowels (ä, ā) differently depending on whether they bore stress or not. This is indicated in the table above: stressed ä ā > a ā while unstressed ä ā > ä a (i.e. Tocharian B a reflects either stressed ä or unstressed ā). An additional complication is that unstressed ä is deleted in open syllables. See below.

Vowel deletion and insertion

Tocharian A deletes all Proto-Tocharian final vowels, as well as all instances of Proto-Tocharian ä in open syllables (which appears to include vowels followed by Cr and Cl sequences). When this produces impossible consonant sequences, these are rectified by vocalizing w and y into u and i, if possible; otherwise, an epenthetic ä is inserted. Note that most consonant sequences are tolerated word-initially, including unexpected cases like rt-, ys- and lks-. Example: PIE h₁rudhros (Greek erythros) > PToch rä́tre > Toch A *rtr > rtär.

Tocharian B deletes only unstressed ä in open syllables, and leaves all other vowels alone. Hence PIE h₁rudhros > PToch rä́tre > Toch B ratre. If necessary, impossible consonant sequences are rectified as in Tocharian A.

Consonants

Proto-Tocharian appears to reflect essentially the same consonant system as in the extant Tocharian languages. However, PIE labiovelars generally remained as kʷ in Proto-Tocharian when they weren't palatalized or directly followed by a consonant in PIE, while they merge into k in most cases in Tocharian A and B. The evidence for this is primarily in the form of various assimilation processes that affected vowels near a labiovelar, and which operated differently in Tocharian A vs. B. In addition, according to Ringe, Proto-Tocharian *kʷ is sometimes retained in Tocharian B (particularly in western dialect texts when directly preceding a voiceless consonant), and Tocharian B outcomes also show that Proto-Tocharian distinguished *kʷ (stemming from PIE labiovelars) from *kw (stemming from a PIE sequence of velar + /w/), unlike other centum languages.

The following are the main changes between PIE and Proto-Tocharian:

• Centum change: PIE "palatals" merge with PIE "plain velars".
• Grassman's Law, whose effects are visible only in dh > d when another PIE aspirate follows in the same word (see below).
• d (including the output of Grassman's Law) > dz > ts (see below).
• In all other cases, contrastive voicing and aspiration is completely lost.
• Extensive palatalization before PIE e, ē, y and sometimes i (see below).
• Loss of final consonants other than r.

Palatalization

Palatalization was a very important process operating in Proto-Tocharian. Palatalization appears to have operated very early, prior to almost all of the vowel changes that took place between PIE and Proto-Tocharian. Palatalization occurred before PIE e, ē, y and sometimes i; specifically, PIE i triggered palatalization of dentals but generally not of velars or labials. Palatalization, or lack thereof, is the only way to distinguish PIE e and i in Tocharian, and the primary way of distinguishing PIE o and ē. Palatalization appeared to have operated in two stages, an earlier one that affected only the sequences ty and dhy, and a later more general one — or at least, the result of palatalization in these cases is different from palatalization of t and dh before e, ē and i, while other consonants do not show such a dual outcome. (Note that Proto-Greek shows a very similar situation with an earlier, more restricted palatalization of dentals followed by a later, more general one.) At least three sound changes occurred prior to palatalization:

1. Grassman's Law, which triggers the change dh > d when another aspirated consonant occurs later in a word (and which also operated in Greek and Indo-Iranian).
2. The change d > dz > ts, which occurred after Grassman's Law. This sound is subject to palatalization. (When not palatalized, ts disappears entirely before Proto-Tocharian rounded vowels, before Proto-Tocharian æ (from PIE o), and before nasals.)
3. The development of PIE iH into y + vowel. (Note that iH develops to ī in most cases in all other Indo-European languages.)

The following chart shows the outcome of palatalization:

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. For example, the Tocharian A word käṣṣi "teacher" is declined as follows:

Verbs

In contrast, the verb verbal conjugation system is quite conservative. The majority of Proto-Indo-European verbal classes and categories are represented in some manner in Tocharian, although not necessarily with the same function. 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.

Categories

Tocharian verbs are conjugated in the following categories:

• Mood: indicative, subjunctive, optative, imperative.
• Tense/Aspect (in the indicative only): present, preterite, imperfect.
• Voice: active, mediopassive, deponent.
• Person: 1st, 2nd, 3rd.
• Number: singular, dual, plural.
• Causation: basic, causative.
• Non-finite: active participle, mediopassive participle, present gerundive, subjunctive gerundive.

Classes

A given verb belongs to one of a large number of classes, according to its conjugation. As in Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and (to a lesser extent) Latin, there are independent sets of classes in the indicative present, subjunctive, perfect, imperative, and to a limited extent optative and imperfect, and there is no general correspondence among the different sets of classes, meaning that each verb must be specified using a number of principal parts.

Present indicative

The most complex system is the present indicative, consisting of 12 classes, 8 thematic and 4 athematic, with distinct sets of thematic and athematic endings. The following classes occur in Tocharian B (some are missing in Tocharian A):

• I: Athematic without suffix < PIE root athematic.
• II: Thematic without suffix < PIE root thematic.
• III: Thematic with PToch suffix *-ë-. Mediopassive only. Apparently reflecting consistent PIE o theme rather than the normal alternating o/e theme.
• IV: Thematic with PToch suffix *-ɔ-. Mediopassive only. Same PIE origin as previous class, but diverging within Proto-Tocharian.
• V: Athematic with PToch suffix *-ā-, likely from either PIE verbs ending in a syllabic laryngeal or PIE derived verbs in *-eh₂- (but extended to other verbs).
• VI: Athematic with PToch suffix *-nā-, from PIE verbs in *-nH-.
• VII: Athematic with infixed nasal, from PIE infixed nasal verbs.
• VIII: Thematic with suffix -s-, possibly from PIE -sḱ-?
• IX: Thematic with suffix -sk- < PIE -sḱ-.
• X: Thematic with PToch suffix *-näsk/nāsk- (evidently a combination of classes VI and IX).
• XI: Thematic in PToch suffix *-säsk- (evidently a combination of classes VIII and IX).
• XII: Thematic with PToch suffix *-(ä)ññ- < either PIE *-n-y- (denominative to n-stem nouns) or PIE *-nH-y- (deverbative from PIE *-nH- verbs).

Palatalization of the final root consonant occurs in the 2nd singular, 3rd singular, 3rd dual and 2nd plural in thematic classes II and VIII-XII as a result of the original PIE thematic vowel e.

Subjunctive

The subjunctive likewise has 12 classes, denoted i through xii. Most are conjugated identically to the corresponding indicative classes; indicative and subjunctive are distinguished by the fact that a verb in a given indicative class will usually belong to a different subjunctive class.

In addition, four subjunctive classes differ from the corresponding indicative classes, two "special subjunctive" classes with differing suffixes and two "varying subjunctive" classes with root ablaut reflecting the PIE perfect.

Special subjunctives:

• iv: Thematic with suffix i < PIE -y-, with consistent palatalization of final root consonant. Tocharian B only, rare.
• vii: Thematic (not athematic, as in indicative class VII) with suffix ñ < PIE -n- (palatalized by thematic e, with palatalized variant generalized).

Varying subjunctives:

• i: Athematic without suffix, with root ablaut reflecting PIE o-grade in active singular, zero-grade elsewhere. Derived from PIE perfect.
• v: Identical to class i but with PToch suffix *-ā-, originally reflecting laryngeal-final roots but generalized.

Preterite

The preterite has 6 classes:

• I: The most common class, with a suffix ā < PIE Ḥ (i.e. roots ending in a laryngeal, although widely extended to other roots). This class shows root ablaut, with original e-grade (and palatalization of the initial root consonant) in the active singular, contrasting with zero-grade (and no palatalization) elsewhere.
• II: This class has reduplication in Tocharian A (possibly reflecting the PIE reduplicated aorist). However, Tocharian B has a vowel reflecting long PIE ē, along with palatalization of the initial root consonant. There is no ablaut in this class.
• III: This class has a suffix s in the 3rd singular active and throughout the mediopassive, evidently reflecting the PIE sigmatic aorist. Root ablaut occurs between active and mediopassive. A few verbs have palatalization in the active along with s in the 3rd singular, but no palatalization and no s in the mediopassive, along with no root ablaut (the vowel reflects PToch ë). This suggests that, for these verbs in particular, the active originates in the PIE sigmatic aorist (with s suffix and ē vocalism) while the mediopassive stems from the PIE perfect (with o vocalism).
• IV: This class has suffix ṣṣā, with no ablaut. Most verbs in this class are causatives.
• V: This class has suffix ñ(ñ)ā, with no ablaut. Only a few verbs belong to this class.
• VI: This class, which has only two verbs, is derived from the PIE thematic aorist. As in Greek, this class has different endings from all the others, which partly reflect the PIE secondary endings (as expected for the thematic aorist).

All except preterite class VI have a common set of endings that stem from the PIE perfect endings, although with significant innovations.

Imperative

The imperative likewise shows 6 classes, with a unique set of endings, found only in the second person, and a prefix beginning with p-. This prefix usually reflects Proto-Tocharian *pä- but unexpected connecting vowels occasionally occur, and the prefix combines with vowel-initial and glide-initial roots in unexpected ways. The prefix is often compared with the Slavic perfective prefix po-, although the phonology is difficult to explain.

Classes i through v tend to co-occur with preterite classes I through V, although there are many exceptions. Class vi is not so much a coherent class as an "irregular" class with all verbs not fitting in other categories. The imperative classes tend to share the same suffix as the corresponding preterite (if any), but to have root vocalism that matches the vocalism of a verb's subjunctive. This includes the root ablaut of subjunctive classes i and v, which tend to co-occur with imperative class i.

Optative and imperfect

The optative and imperfect have related formations. The optative is generally built by adding i onto the subjunctive stem. Tocharian B likewise forms the imperfect by adding i onto the present indicative stem, while Tocharian A has 4 separate imperfect formations: usually ā is added to the subjunctive stem, but occasionally to the indicative stem, and sometimes either ā or s is added directly onto the root. The endings differ between the two languages: Tocharian A uses present endings for the optative and preterite endings for the imperfect, while Tocharian B uses the same endings for both, which are a combination of preterite and unique endings (the latter used in the singular active).

Endings

As suggested by the above discussion, there are a large number of sets of endings. The present-tense endings come in both thematic and athematic variants, although they are related, with the thematic endings generally reflecting a theme vowel (PIE e or o) plus the athematic endings. There are different sets for the preterite classes I through V; preterite class VI; the imperative; and in Tocharian B, in the singular active of the optative and imperfect. Furthermore, each set of endings comes with both active and mediopassive forms. The mediopassive forms are quite conservative, directly reflecting the PIE variation between -r in the present and -i in the past. (Most other languages with the mediopassive have generalized one of the two.)

The present-tense endings are almost completely divergent between Tocharian A and B. The following shows the thematic endings, with their origin:

Comparison to other Indo-European languages

1. ^ Cognate, with shifted meaning
2. Borrowed cognate, not native.

In traditional Indo-European studies, no hypothesis of a closer genealogical relationship of the Tocharian languages has been generally agreed to. However, lexicostatistical and glottochronological approaches attest for the Anatolian languages, including Hittite, as the closest relatives of Tocharian. As an example, the same Proto-Indo-European root *h₂wrg(h)- (but not a common suffixed formation) can be reconstructed to underlie the words for 'wheel': Tocharian A wärkänt B yerkwanto and Hittite ḫūrkis.

See also

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Indo-European studies Scholars Marija Gimbutas J. P. Mallory Institutes Copenhagen Studies in Indo-European Publications Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture The Horse, the Wheel, and Language Journal of Indo-European Studies Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch Indo-European Etymological Dictionary
v t e

• Language families and languages
• Tocharians
• Tocharian and Indo-European Studies (journal)

References

1. ^ Mallory, J.P. "Bronze Age languages of the Tarim Basin" (PDF). Expedition. 52 (3): 44–53.
2. Deuel, Leo. 1970. Testaments of Time, ch. XXI, pp. 425–455. Baltimore, Pelican Books. Orig. publ. Knopf, NY, 1965.
3. J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair (2000). "Chapter 9 – Tocharian Trekkers". The Tarim Mummies. Thames & Hudson. pp. 270–297. ISBN 0-500-05101-1.
4. Beckwith, Christopher (2009). Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Asia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton University Press. pp. 380–383. ISBN 978-0-691-15034-5.
5. ^ Tocharian Online: Series Introduction, Todd B. Krause and Jonathan Slocum, University of Texas as Austin.
6. Mallory, J.P.; Adams, Douglas Q., eds. (1997). Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. London: Fitzroy Dearborn. p. 509. ISBN 978-1-884964-98-5.
7. Sergent, Bernard (1995). Les Indo-Européens: Histoire, langues, mythes. Payot. pp. 113–117. ISBN 978-2-228-88956-8.
8. Daniels (1996), p. 531.
9. Campbell (2000), p. 1666.
10. "Fragments of the Tocharian", Andrew Leonard, How the World Works, Salon.com, January 29, 2008
11. Wright, J.C. (1999). "Review: Fragments of the Tocharian A Maitreyasamiti-Nāṭaka of the Xinjiang Museum, China. In Collaboration with Werner Winter and Georges-Jean Pinault by Ji Xianlin". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies". 62 (2): 367–370. doi:10.1017/S0041977X00017079. JSTOR 3107526.
12. Ji, Xianlin; Winter, Werner; Pinault, Georges-Jean (1998). Fragments of the Tocharian A Maitreyasamiti-Nataka of the Zinjiang Museum, China]. Mouton De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-014904-3.
13. Renfrew, Colin Archaeology and language (1990), pg 107
14. Baldi, Philip The Foundations of Latin (1999), pg 39
15. Douglas Adams, "Ablaut and Umlaut in the Tocharian Vowel System", Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 98, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1978), pp. 446- 450.
16. *ckāc- < *tkāc- by assimilation.
17. Donald A. Ringe Jr, "Review of 'Tocharian Historical Phonology and Morphology' by Douglas Q. Adams", Language, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Jun., 1990), pp. 400-408.
18. Beekes, Robert S.P. (1995). Comparative Indo-European linguistics: an Introduction. J. Benjamins. p. 92. ISBN 978-90-272-2151-3.
19. Beekes (1995), p. 20.
20. Douglas Q. Adams, "On the Development of the Tocharian Verbal System", Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 98, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1978), pp. 277- 288.
21. Holm, Hans J. (2008). "The Distribution of Data in Word Lists and its Impact on the Subgrouping of Languages", In: Christine Preisach, Hans Burkhardt, Lars Schmidt-Thieme, Reinhold Decker (Editors): Data Analysis, Machine Learning, and Applications. Proc. of the 31st Annual Conference of the German Classification Society (GfKl), University of Freiburg, March 7–9, 2007. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg-Berlin.
22. Václav Blažek (2007), "From August Schleicher to Sergej Starostin; On the development of the tree-diagram models of the Indo-European languages". Journal of Indo-European Studies 35 (1&2): 82–109.
23. Remco Bouckaert, Philippe Lemey, Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Alexander V. Alekseyenko, Alexei J. Drummond, Russell D. Gray, Marc A. Suchard, Quentin D. Atkinson (2012). "Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family". Science 337 (6097): 957–960.

Sources

• Carling, Gerd (2009). Dictionary and Thesaurus of Tocharian A. Volume 1: a-j. (in collaboration with Georges-Jean Pinault and Werner Winter), Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag, ISBN 978-3-447-05814-8.
• Daniels, Peter (1996), The Worlds Writing Systems, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-507993-0.
• Campbell, George (2000), Compendium of the World's Languages Second Edition: Volume II Ladkhi to Zuni, Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-20298-5.
• "Tokharian Pratimoksa Fragment Sylvain Levi". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. 1913, pp. 109–120.
• Mallory, J.P. and Victor H. Mair (2000). The Tarim Mummies. London: Thames & Hudson, ISBN 0-500-05101-1.
• Malzahn, Melanie (ed.) (2007). Instrumenta Tocharica. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, ISBN 978-3-8253-5299-8.
• Pinault, Georges-Jean (2008). Chrestomathie tokharienne. Textes et grammaire, Leuven-Paris, Peeters (Collection linguistique publiée par la Société de Linguistique de Paris, t. XCV), ISBN 978-90-429-2168-9.
• Schmalsteig, William R. (1974). "Tokharian and Baltic." Lituanus. v. 20, no. 3.
• Krause, Wolfgang and Werner Thomas (1960). Tocharisches Elemantarbuch. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
• Winter, Werner (1998). "Tocharian." In Ramat, Giacalone Anna and Paolo Ramat (eds). The Indo-European languages, 154–168. London: Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-06449-1.

External links

• Conjugation tables for Tocharian A and B
• Tocharian alphabet (from Omniglot)
• TITUS: Tocharian alphabets& Manuscripts from the Berlin Turfan Collection
• Mark Dickens, 'Everything you always wanted to know about Tocharian'
• A Tocharian-to-English dictionary with nearly 200 words
• Tocharian Online from the University of Texas at Austin
• Online dictionary of Tocharian B with over 4000 entries.
• Tocharian B Swadesh list (From Wiktionary)
• Comprehensive Edition of Tocharian Manuscripts, Universität Wien, with images, transcriptions and (in many cases) translations and other information.

• Medieval languages
• Indo-European languages
• Languages of China
• Central Asia
• Extinct languages of Asia
• Tocharians