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( Tocharian languages)
Tocharian or Tokharian is one of the branches of the Indo-European language family. The name of the language is taken from people known to the Greek historians (Ptolemy VI, 11, 6) as the Tocharians (Greek ???a???, "Tokharoi"). These are sometimes identified with the Yuezhi and the Kushans, while the term Tokharistan usually refers to 1st millennium Bactria. A Turkic text refers to the Turfanian language (Tocharian A) as twqry. Interpretation is difficult, but F. W. K. Müller has associated this with the name of the Bactrian Tokharoi. Tocharian consisted of two languages; Tocharian A (Turfanian, Arsi, or East Tocharian) and Tocharian B (Kuchean or West Tocharian). These languages were spoken roughly from the sixth to ninth centuries; before they became extinct, their speakers were absorbed into the expanding Uyghur tribes. Both languages were once spoken in the Tarim Basin in Central Asia, now the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. Phonetically, Tocharian is a "centum" Indo-European language, characterized by the merging of palato-velar consonants with plain velars (*k, *g, *gh), which is generally associated with Indo-European languages of the West European area (Italic, Celtic, Germanic). In that sense, Tocharian, along with Greek and the Anatolian languages, seems to have been an isolate in the "Satem" phonetic world of Indo-European-speaking East European and Asian populations. Note that the above consonantal values are largely based on the writing of Sanskrit/Prakrit loanwords. A retroflex value for /?/ is particularly suspect as it is derived from palatalized /s/; it was probably a low-frequency sibilant /?/ (like German spelling <sch>), as opposed to the higher-frequency sibilant /?/ (like Mandarin Pinyin spelling <x>).
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