Tocharian: Tracing the Footprints of Proto-Indo-European's Second Child
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- čas přidán 13. 10. 2023
- Welcome to our voyage into the world of Tocharian! A language family considered by many to be the second child of Proto-Indo-European.
In this video, we delve deep into the history, evolution, and unique characteristics of the Tocharian language. Join us as we explore the proto-stages of Tocharian and discover how it differs from its Indo-European roots.
🔍 Here's what you can expect in this video:
1. Proto Tocharian and Origins - We kick things off by tracing the roots (both linguistic and geographical) of Tocharian and understand its evolution from its Indo-European ancestor.
2. Differences from Proto-Indo-European- We'll uncover the distinct features that set Tocharian apart from its Proto-Indo-European roots. Some interesting stuff here.
3. Loan Words from Proto-Turkic, Mongolian, and Old Chinese- Tocharian's history is not isolated. We'll explore the influence of neighboring languages, including Proto-Turkic, Mongolian, and Old Chinese, through loanwords that enrich its vocabulary. Interestingly, Old Chinese borrowed many terms from Tocharian for Chariotry.
4. Analyzing a Tocharian Sentence- Language nerds, this part is for you! We present an example Tocharian sentence that we will analyse together and break down. It's a unique opportunity to grasp the intricacies of this ancient language and we used the same term in our previous video on Proto-Indo-European, so you can go back and compare to the Anatolian and Celtic branches.
5. The Decline of Tocharian - Every linguistic story has its ups and downs. We'll briefly discuss the decline of Tocharian and the historical factors that led to its fading into obscurity.
Whether you're a linguist, a history buff, or simply curious about the rich tapestry of human language, this video promises to be an enlightening experience. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell to stay updated on our linguistic explorations.
Join us on this exciting journey through time and language as we unravel the mysteries of Tocharian. Let's get started! 🗺️📚🗣️
Sources-
Peyrot, M. (2019). The deviant typological profile of the Tocharian branch of Indo-European may be due to Uralic substrate influence. Indo-European Linguistics, 7(1), 72-121.
Kim, R. I. (2018). The dual in Tocharian: From typology to Auslautgesetz.
Adams, D. Q. (01 Jan. 2013). A Dictionary of Tocharian B (2 Vols.). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Retrieved Oct 14, 2023
Carling, G; Pinault, G.J., Dictionary and Thesaurus of Tocharian A. Harrassowitz, 2023
Lane, G. S. (1959). The Formation of the Tocharian Subjunctive. Language, 35(2), 157-179.
Arndt, W. W., Brosman, P. W., Coenen, F. E., & Friedrich, W. P. (Eds.). (1967). Studies in Historical Linguistics in Honor of George Sherman Lane: Festschrift for George S. Lane (Vol. 58). University of North Carolina Press.
Lubotsky, A. & Starostin, S. (2003). Turkic and Chinese loan words in Tocharian. In B. Bauer & G. Pinault (Ed.), Language in Time and Space: A Festschrift for Werner Winter on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday (pp. 257-270). Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton
Lubotsky, Alexander. (1998). Tocharian loan words in Old Chinese: Chariots, chariot gear, and town building. Victor H. Mair (ed.), The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, 379 - 390, (1998).
Mallory, J., & Adams, D. Q. (2006). The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press.
Pokorny, Julius (1959), “dher-, dherə-”, in Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch [Indo-European Etymological Dictionary] (in German), volume 1, Bern, München: Francke Verlag, pages 252-254
Witczak, K. T. (2018). Najdawniejsze zapożyczenia chińskie w językach tocharskich. Roczniki Humanistyczne, 66, 121-138.
Tocharian History and Culture-
STJ - Blond Mummies, Tocharians and Indo-Europeans of China
• Blond Mummies, Tochari...
Tocharian Resources-
cetom.univie.ac.at/
lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/tokol
spw.uni-goettingen.de/project...
Map-
maps-for-free.com/
Hans Braxmeier, Donaustraße 13, 89231 Neu-Ulm, mail@braxmeier.de
All pictures are either in the public domain, licensed by pixabay or shutterstock.
If you feel that you deserve attribution for your work; but haven’t, please feel free to get in touch and I will add the appropriate attribution.
Special Thanks to Pixabay artists -
b52_Tresa, larcomar, marcelkessler, letitiamperry, quillau
Music-
Sao Meo - Doug Maxwell_ Zac Zinger
#Tocharian
#Linguistics
#LanguageHistory
#ProtoIndoEuropean
#AncientLanguages
#IndoEuropeanStudies
#ProtoTurkic
#MongolianLanguage
#OldChinese
#Tarim
There are essentially two classes of humans: those who can pronounce the laryngeals and those who can't (I confess to the latter 😅)
😅
A third class must be those people who don't believe in them 😀
Swords of the Tocharian Knights depict in the murals of the Kizil Caves strikingly similar with Celtic long swords.
And also physical appearance of the Tocharians similar with Celtic people . Like reddish hair, green eyes, unusually tall stature.
Some linguists like J.Puhvel have also demonstrated some evidence that Tocharian was linguistically closer to Italo-Celtic and Anatolian than the other PIE languages (he coined the group western Indo European). It's very interesting considering the location of Tocharian and the observations you have made. One thing's for sure... Tocharian has an interesting history!
Yes even Tocharian language is similar to Proto Celtic.
but different ancestors
Ita very cool
Thank you very much. It was fascinating and excellent
Thank you very much for your kind words! They motivate me endlessly!
Some notes:
At 10:20 there is a type for the ALL and ABL case, the K and T should be reversed as in the other cases.
Thanks to @abandoninplace2751
At 0:20 I will clarify my statement regarding the 'closeness' of Hittite and Tocharian with a quotation from Jasanoff, 2017:
'Interestingly, some of the strongest indicators of the archaic status of Anatolian were the special traits that Hittite shared with Tocharian. These included the joint failure of Anatolian and Tocharian to form thorn clusters, the limited development of the thematic conjugation, and the mixed, still largely non-sigmatic character of what was to become the s-aorist. The adoption of a “layered”
model of Proto-Indo-European thus showed not only that Anatolian was the first branch to leave the family, but also that Tocharian, the other “new” branch at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the second'
Legend.🙂
Might one assume that circa 10:20 for ALL and ABL that we have mere typo transposition of k and t?
Yes, you are correct, I'll add the correction to the pinned comment. Thank you!
In polish once was cma (slavic originally meaning 'darkness', now 'a moth') that meant also a great number, 10.000 😅
"Их тьмы и тьмы" = "there are tens and tens thousands of them", eh?
Would it be accurate to compare the relationship with Tocharian A to Tocharian B to that of Ecclesiastical Latin with Classical Latin and Classic Sanskrit to Vedic Sanskrit?
It would be odd since tocharian b is the more conservative of the two languages
Nice video (: I hope you get out of the Tarim basin safe and sound though
It was a tough journey...but I finally made it 😉
@@LearnHittite 😄
Today Uyghurs of north Tarim basin have some Tocharian blood
Absolutely
@@LearnHittite and the Tajiks of xinjiang are the saka people
Yes, modern Uyghurs are a mixture of the Turkic language ethnic group, the Uyghurs, who migrated south from the Mongolian Plateau to replace the Indo European language ethnic group (Tocharian）in the Xinjiang region.
do we know of any substrate like a north or west paleo-siberian language, in indo-europea?
I'm not aware of any formal attempts to demonstrate a substrate but I'm sure many people have speculated.
How did the ancient indo European people travel so far away from their homeland and what made the population split.😮
And it’s quite interesting that there were also Iranian speakers khotanese dwelling alone the tarim river. Did the tocharians and the khotanese know each other or they may not live at the same time?
I think many, if not all, language families naturally go through a process of diffusion and dispersal. Indo-European is no different to say the Uralic language family, or the Bantu language family in that regard.
I think it might have been a Crecganford video, but I can't remember. In it, they explained that a common practice amongst the IEs was to expel all the young males from the tribe when the tribe's population got unsustainably high. These roving bands of men would then head off to other areas and settle to form new tribes, but not before doing a lot of raiding in between. It wouldn't take long for this process to become exponential in growth and spread of the language in the waves we see.
Dude . They didnt travel anywhere . They were from there proto indo Europeans gave birth to eurorpeans.. where have you been?
@@Ecstaticgoat i mean those who traveled to the tocharian land
Yes they knew of eachother because the history is written in detail among hindu scripts. Kushans were the descendants out of these people.
Tocharians mixed in with the Uyghur population later.
And don't forget kushans and scythians..
hm...maybe the tocharians who called themselves kushans,had sth to do with shusha,which is located in azerbaycan,the caucasus...these noble people in the tarim basin are either prototurkic or scythians coming from the caucasus or are their descendants...the mummies which were found there have lots of things in common with the traditional culture of anatolia,the caucasus,and central asia...even the step...their language?i heard,that coming closer to buddhism they adopted more indo words,and were affected by neighboring languages...originally,i think they had an agglunitative language,that is,it was uralic.
Turkish languages weren''t spoken in Anatolia or Caucasus until middle ages then nothing to do with ancient Azerbaycan. Maybe if there are things in common, it is due to common indoeuropean roots between tocharian, hittites of Anatolia, iranian scythes etc.
Kushana probably derive from Kucha, a tocharian city-state in modern Sinkiang.
Dynamic characteristics of the structural features of the tocharian suggests the identification of several chrono-
logical layers, which can be correlated with different stages of history
its carriers and their migrations. The protocharian language dates back to
a special dialect of the common Indo-European proto-language, in the latter
spoke around the 5th -4th millennium BC. e. tribes that lived
but west of Central Asia: either in the Northern Black Sea region,
or in the Volga-Ural steppes 1. In any of the natural
theories of the Indo-European ancestral home remains undeniable that,,
having separated from other related dialects, Protocharian
had to go a very long way, the last stage of the
which leads through Central Asia to Eastern Turkestan(Xinjiang)
Why the verb is.conjugated like this?
Which verb?
@@LearnHittite aiśśam
Indoeuropeans 😎
interesting turkic loans
I don't see linguistic evidence for the Afansievo theory, a southern route is more likely (shared farming terms with Iranian) ... And genetic evidence is still in its infancy
I will confess that I only glanced through the resource I had connected to Tocharian and Indo-Iranian loans but why would it indicate a more southern route?
*CE
Afanasevo
Anatolian, Celtic, Tocharian, proves that migrations came from west Europe! Not all the way around!
Are you suggesting P.I.E. didn’t originate from the Pontic caspian steppe or the Caucasus but rather from Western Europe??? There is absolutely no support for your hypothesis, and I’d wager there is more support for the hypothesis that the urheimat of indo-european was in Anatolia than there is for it being in Western Europe.
You butchered the name of the Afanas'evo culture, it's AfanAs'evo, with the emphasis on the second A, which you completely omitted... :) It comes from Russian name 'Afanasiy' that is equivalent of the Greek name 'Athanasius'.
Thanks for the feedback!
@@LearnHittite , Thank you for the video, I found it after searching for data about the origin of Proto-Tocharians, and you gave me exactly that. BTW, there was a paper in 2021 claiming that Tarim mummies did not descend from the Afanasievo based on genomic data (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8580821/).
@@LearnHittite , Thank you for the video, I found it after searching for data about the origin of Proto-Tocharians, and you gave me exactly that. BTW, there was a paper in 2021 claiming that Tarim mummies did not descend from the Afanasievo based on genomic data. The name of the article is 'The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies', you can easily find it online (I can't leave the link in the comment, since CZcams removes it).
Thanks, I'll check it out!
Tocharian is not closely related to Hittite. Tocharian is actually a branch of extinct Indo-European languages very distantly related to the Anatolian languages.
And correct the Tocharians came from the Afanasievo culture
I disagree, but I understand I could have termed it better.
My main argument is that Hittite and Tocharian (or rather Proto-Anatolian and Proto-Tocharian) are not part of the 'Inner-IE' group. See Kassian et al., 2021 (www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2020-0060/html?lang=en). Most academics consider Anatolian to be the first language group to split, with Tocharian being the second. As we know, Hittite is the best-attested Anatolian language, and a significant amount of the Proto-Anatolian reconstruction data comes from Hittite and Luwian.
I believe Kloekhorst places the time between the Anatolian and Tocharian split at around 800 years, while others suggest a shorter duration (Ringe-Taylor-Warnow). Tocharian and Anatolian share interesting lexical characteristics (such as verbs for 'to die,' 'to drink,' and 'to make'). They also exhibit similarities in wh-question syntax (as discussed in Windhearn's draft paper) and features like the individualizing plural endings '*-anta.' Of course, there are key differences.
Early articles on the subject, like 'Hittite and Tocharian' by Peterson in 1933, proposed that these languages were in dialectic unity for some time. While I'm uncertain about that, I do believe that Tocharian's 'closest' attested relative would be Hittite.
I'll add a pinned comment to clarify and I'm welcome to hear your counter arguments.
Hittite and Tocharian ARE closely related. Old Hittite and Tocharian split within 500 years of each other... Let's look at other language families... In Sino Tibetan, Old Chinese and Burmese split after 4000 years, in proto Semitic Akkadian and Amharic split after 3500 years.... 500 - 800 years is nothing.
@@LearnHittite
I didn't finish my initial comment. I got busy. But I'll be sure to get back to on this.
It is not distantly related but related.
Tocharian(Kussine, Arsi)
people are ANE people not Hittite.
very far relationship.
Tocharians are 80% Ancient North Eurasian genetic pool.
Which are Ancestors of EHG who are ancestors of Yamnaya.
Chinese borrowed words of lion, mead, dog, hound from Tocharian.
Lion is From Iranian Language
@@PatriotOfPersia Can you elaborate?
Great video--thank you!
Thanks for the kind words! They keep me motivated to make more.