I asked several IEist colleagues:<\/p>\r\n
Of all the IE languages, which one is Tocharian closest to?
Celtic?
Germanic?<\/p>\r\n
<\/p>\r\n
Answers received:<\/p>\r\n
James P. Mallory:<\/p>\r\n
I can't answer that but since almost all the phylogenies have it leaving after Anatolian one could argue that it does not actually have any close relatives, i.e., it was never really paired with any other branch before it left. This would make sense if you go with the Yamnaya > Afanasievo > Shamirshak route.<\/p>\r\n
Don Ringe:<\/p>\r\n
None.\u00a0 In other words, if you ask the question that way, you can't get a coherent answer.\u00a0 The situation seems to be the following.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n
The Anatolian subgroup is clearly half of the IE family; *all*the*other*subgroups*together* are the other half, so you can't say that Anatolian is closer to any particular one.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n
The non-Anatolian half of the family is increasingly being called \"Nuclear IE\".\u00a0 A consensus is developing that Tocharian is half of Nuclear IE; all the other subgroups together are the other half, so you can't say that Tocharian is closer to any particular one.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n
The internal structure of the remaining group, which we're beginning to call \"Core IE\", is more complex and less clear, but that has nothing to do with the position of Tocharian.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n
As for where the (pre-)Tocharians came from, I'm sure David Anthony is right:\u00a0 they moved east from Ukraine abruptly around 3500 BCE, when the speakers of Core IE were still in contact with each other and probably constituted a dialect continuum.\u00a0 I'm attaching our 2015 paper, in which David outlines the evidence.<\/p>\r\n
As for the evidence and reasoning behind the tree structure, below is the barest minimum presentation of conclusions now widespread among IEists.<\/p>\r\n
Indo-Europeanists do not usually propose cladistic trees based only on comparative wordlists, for a simple reason: lexical items are not the most reliable indicator of linguistic ancestry. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 On the one hand, it can be difficult to distinguish innovations (which demonstrate shared history) from retentions (which do not); on the other hand, it is too easy for closely related languages to borrow words from each other, and it is often difficult to detect such borrowings.<\/p>\r\n
Instead we rely most on shared sound changes and shared innovations in inflectional morphology\u2014two types of innovations which are learned in native language acquisition and which strongly resist modification later in an individual\u2019s life. We use lexical items only as an aid to fleshing out a tree drawn from phonological and morphological characters. What is said below rests on these arguments.<\/p>\r\n
Almost all Indo-Europeanists now agree that the Anatolian subgroup is one half of the family; all the other subgroups together, sometimes called \u201cNuclear IE\u201d, are the other half, because they share inflectional innovations not found in Anatolian. Probably there was a single Proto-Nuclear IE language for some centuries. It follows that Anatolian is not more closely related to any particular subgroup of the family than to any other.<\/p>\r\n
Within Nuclear IE, it is beginning to look like Tocharian is one half and all the other subgroups together are the other half, sometimes called \u201cCore IE\u201d. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 There is plausible archaeological evidence that Tocharian split off from Core IE around 3300 BCE, because at that date a culture obviously derived from the Ukrainian steppes appears suddenly near the Altai mountains (see the discussion of Anthony and Ringe in the Annual Review of Linguistics,<\/em> Vol. 1, 2015). \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 In this case too it follows that Tocharian is, so to speak, equidistant from the remaining Nuclear IE subgroups. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\r\n What about the diversification of Core IE? That\u2019s not so clear. The western branches, Celtic and Italic, share a few innovations not shared by the other subgroups; the same can be said of the eastern branches, namely Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian. (Where Albanian fits is not discoverable, because by the time it began to be written down, all the diagnostic inflectional evidence had been lost.) But lexemes are shared in various patterns across the whole Core, which suggests that the ancestors of these branches were in contact for a long time, at least pairwise, and we might be looking at the wreckage of a dialect continuum for which no clean tree can be drawn.<\/p>\r\n Douglas Adams:<\/p>\r\n Of the two groups you mention, the unquestionable \"winner\" is Germanic.\u00a0 Indeed, I would state that Germanic is the closest Indo-European relative of Tocharian, though the relationship is not terribly strong.\u00a0 Second in line might be Slavic.\u00a0 Which would put the \"original\" location of the pre-Tocharians somewhere on the \"northern frontier\" of the oldest reconstructible Indo-European world.\u00a0 There are clear Iranian influences on Tocharian, but those influences are late (as explained in the Mallory festschrift article [VHM:\u00a0 forthcoming]).\u00a0 The earlier connections are fleshed out a bit in my contribution to the second edition of The Indo-European Languages (ed. Kapovic).\u00a0 If pressed I would be strongly tempted to put Celtic dead last as a relative of Tocharian (despite all those plaids associated with the Tarim mummies).<\/p>\r\n With regard to Celtic, it's the absence of evidence which I think significant.\u00a0 But proving a negative is notoriously difficult.\u00a0 People may be able to adduce some real evidence that I'm not aware of.\u00a0 Despite Hamp's tutelage I'm not as up on Celtica as I might be.\u00a0 And my calculations take no account of Albanian and Armenian, again for lack of data.\u00a0 But for those two it's different: it's a lack of data pure and simple, in Celtic's case it's a lack of confirming data.<\/p>\r\n I should emphasize that my notions of IE internal relationships as they pertain to Tocharian are quite impressionistic: I have not ever tried to quantify things.\u00a0 I feel secure about the positive relationships with Germanic and Slavic but much less so about the \"negative relationships.\"<\/p>\r\n As a dirt archeologist and historian of languages, peoples, and cultures, I still have a strong intuition that the Tocharians — though far older than the Celts — are somehow related to them, perhaps through some missing intermediaries<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n 10-20 years ago, Julie Wei did extensive research on Celtic-Sinitic comparative linguistics.\u00a0 For the Celtic side, she relied heavily on the best Welsh lexicographical tools.\u00a0 In one of the volumes on the Yih<\/em> (Changes) that Denis Mair and I are nearing completion of, I will provide information on the methods and results of Julie Wei.\u00a0 For now, I will just mention two of my favorite tools for studying old Celtic:<\/p>\r\n (GPC) Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru<\/em><\/a> (A Dictionary of the Welsh Language) Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic<\/em> by Ranko Matasovic'.\u00a0 Leiden:\u00a0 Brill, 2009.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n \u00a7\u00a7\u00a7<\/p>\r\n Note from Julie Wei (6\/20\/23):<\/p>\r\n Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru: A Dictionary of the Welsh Language, I used this first edition for my 2005 papers.<\/p>\r\n There is a second edition, consisting of Parts 1 to 12, 2003-2013 <\/p>\r\n Selected readings on Tocharian The language, the people, and their history<\/p>\r\n Archeology and language<\/p>\r\n The origin of the Tocharians and their relationship to the Yuezhi (\u6708\u6c0f) have been debated for more than a century, since the discovery of the Tocharian language. This debate has led to progress on both the scope and depth of our knowledge about the origin of the Indo-European language family and of the Indo-Europeans. Archaeological evidence supporting these theories, however, has until now sadly been lacking<\/p>\r\n There are many other Language Log posts that mention Tocharian and the Tocharians.\u00a0 Readers are encouraged to search for them in various contexts.<\/p>\r\n Selected readings on PIE<\/strong><\/p>\r\n
Y geiriadur hanesyddol safonol Cymraeg (The standard historical Welsh dictionary)<\/p>\r\n
4 vols, First Edition, 1997-2002, University of Wales. (see Wiki.)<\/p>\r\n
(from google \"A Dictionary of the Welsh language\").<\/p>\r\n
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