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In recent weeks and months, Language Log has been quite active in discussions on Tocharian and its relationship to other members of Indo-European.  Today's post takes a different approach from this post made just yesterday and many earlier posts.

"Europe's ancient languages shed light on a great migration and weather vocabulary"

by Ali Jones, Horizon: The EU Research & Innovation Magazine (8/15/23)

Painstaking archaeological exploration is a familiar, often widely admired, method of unearthing history. Less celebrated, but also invaluable, is the piecing together of fragments of ancient languages and analyzing how they changed over thousands of years.

Historical linguists have reconstructed a common ancestral tongue for most of the languages spoken today in Europe and South Asia. English, German, Greek, Hindi and Urdu—among others in the Indo-European family of languages—can all trace their origins to a single spoken one named Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

The Horizon article also reports on the light being shed upon weather terminology in the daughter languages of PIE through another EU-funded project called IE CLIMATE, but the main thrust of the article in on the movement of Tocharian from Europe to the Tarim Basin in Central Asia.

Linguistic ripples

The language is believed to have been spoken from roughly 4,500 BC to 2,500 BC. No written traces remain.

The people who spoke PIE probably lived in an area that is now eastern Ukraine. As groups broke away over the centuries to migrate across the continent, daughter languages stretched from Ireland to the Indian Ocean.

Yet the pattern included a notable exception: a now-extinct branch of the Indo-European language family made its way from Europe more than 4,000 kilometers eastward to end up at the Tarim Basin in northwest China.

Learning how and when these people, known as the Tocharians, undertook the odyssey are the goals of an EU-funded research project.

"It gives us a fascinating insight about how far people could migrate and what sort of risks and hardships they were actually prepared to expose themselves to," said Professor Michaël Peyrot of the Center for Linguistics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

Peyrot coordinates the European project, which is called TheTocharianTrek and is due to end in December 2023 after almost six years.

The research is helping to pin down where the Tocharians were located in the period between 3,500 BC, when they may have left their ancestral home, and their first written history in 400 AD.

In sum, the initiative is mapping the migration route from the PIE homeland all the way to China.

Through the journey, the Tocharians brought their dialect of PIE into contact with people speaking different languages. This influenced and changed the way the Tocharians spoke until finally their recorded languages evolved.

Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that the Tocharians first moved to southern Siberia.

Peyrot and his research colleagues have sought to provide a linguistic assessment of this route. Their work reveals that, indeed, some of the quirkiest features of the language fit very well with tongues spoken in southern Siberia.

"Languages preserve precious information about their prehistory through the effects of language contact," said Peyrot. "Observing the effects of language contact, such as borrowed words, enables us to draw conclusions about the proximity of the speakers of different languages and at which point in time the contact took place."

As an example of a borrowed word, he cited a term for sword in a language strand known as Tocharian B: "kertte" was taken from "karta" in Old Iranian.

The research team has concluded that the Tocharians arrived in the Tarim Basin in around 1,000 BC—later than was previously thought.

As result, their window of influence in the Tarim Basin has narrowed and the Tocharians are being assigned a more muted role in the prehistory of the area than they have traditionally been given.

Instead, the project has found a strengthened role for Iranian languages and peoples in the area, especially Khotanese, its relative Tumshuqese and Niya Prakrit. All influenced Tocharian.

There's no doubt that Iranian peoples were moving into the Tarim Basin during the first millennium BC.  We know that from archeological, physical anthropological, cultural, and other types of evidence, so these findings of the European project are not the least bit surprising.  On the other hand, we also know that there were Europoid groups in the Tarim Basin from the early part of the second millennium BC whose archeological, physical anthropological, and cultural attributes — differing from the Iranian groups coming into the Tarim Basin during the first millennium BC — are not taken into account by The Tocharian Trek project.  As I have maintained throughout my research in the Tarim Basin from the early 90s and up to the present day, the most parsimonious explanation for the palpable existence of those second millennium inhabitants of Eastern Central Asia (ECA) — taking into account the abundant evidence of all types concerning them — is that they were the Tocharians or some closely related ancestral group.

Selected readings

• Victor H. Mair, ed., The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man Inc. in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, 1998).  2 vols. (around a thousand pages; numerous maps and figures).
• P. Mallory and Victor H.Mair,The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West (London:  Thames & Hudson, 2000).
• "Early Indo-Europeans in Xinjiang" (11/19/08).
• Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu:  University of Hawai'i Press, 2006).
• Victor H. Mair, "Language and Script: Biology, Archaeology, and (Pre)History," International Review of Chinese Linguistics, 1.1 (1996), 31a-41b.
• J. P. Mallory, "The Problem of Tocharian Origins: An Archaeological Perspective," Sino-Platonic Papers, 259 (Nov. 2015); free pdf, 63 pp.
• HAN Kangxin, "The Study of Ancient Human Skeletons from Xinjiang, China", Sino-Platonic Papers, 51 (Nov. 1994), 9 pp. + 4 figs.
• "Tarim harps; pitch, tones, scales, modes, instruments, and their names" (5/21/22)

 

• "The origins and affinities of Tocharian" (8/20/23) — with rich bibliographical resources
• "Where did the PIEs come from; when was that?" (7/28/23)
• "The Ossetes" (7/25/21) — with an extensive bibliography of Central Asian languages and archeology, especially as they pertain to Iranian peoples; also search Language Log under Middle Iranian languages for numerous relevant posts

[thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto]

August 21, 2023 @ 9:29 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Historical linguistics, Language and archeology, Language and culture, Language and history

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