Indo-European, Tocharian · Brahmi
Tocharian
- Spoken
- c. AD 400–1000
- Where
- The Tarim Basin oases, today Xinjiang, China
At the start of the twentieth century, expeditions to the desert oases of Chinese Turkestan brought home manuscripts in an unknown language, written in an Indian script. When scholars read them, they found words like pācer, 'father', and mācer, 'mother'. These were Indo-European words, cousins of Latin pater and māter, written by Buddhist monks thousands of kilometres east of any other ancient branch of the family. The language, or rather two languages, became known as Tocharian.
Where and when
Tocharian was spoken in oasis cities along the northern rim of the Tarim Basin, on the Silk Road. Tocharian B is found mainly around Kucha, Tocharian A mainly around Turfan and Karashahr. They differ about as much as German and English do. The oases lived from irrigated farming and from the caravan trade between China, India and Iran.
The manuscripts date roughly from the fifth or sixth to the tenth centuries AD. Most are Buddhist texts translated from Sanskrit, but there are also monastery accounts, letters, medical texts and caravan passes. Many survived in the dry caves of cliff-side monasteries such as Kizil. Many pages are now in Berlin, Paris and St Petersburg.
How it fell silent
In the 840s the Uyghur khaganate in Mongolia collapsed, and Uyghur Turks migrated into the Tarim Basin, founding a kingdom at Turfan. Over the next two centuries Old Uyghur, a Turkic language, became the language of power and, increasingly, of everyday life. Tocharian A was already a mostly religious language by then, used in monasteries like Latin in medieval Europe.
The last Tocharian texts date to around the tenth century, and the language probably died out not long after. Islam reached the western Tarim Basin from the tenth century onward and later spread across the region, ending the Buddhist culture in which Tocharian was copied. The manuscripts sat in caves and ruins until European, Russian and Japanese expeditions found them around 1900.
How it may have sounded
-
𑀧𑀸𑀘𑁂𑀭𑁆
pācer
Say it roughly PAH-cher/ˈpaːt͡ɕər/
“father”
Tocharian B; the cognate of Latin pater and English father. The c is thought to have been a palatal sound like ch, and the Brahmi spelling here is a simplified standard form of the Tocharian letters.
-
𑀫𑀸𑀘𑁂𑀭𑁆
mācer
Say it roughly MAH-cher/ˈmaːt͡ɕər/
“mother”
Tocharian B; compare Latin māter. The Brahmi letter ā probably marked a stressed or full vowel rather than real length, one of several open questions.
-
𑀧𑁆𑀭𑁄𑀘𑁂𑀭𑁆
procer
Say it roughly PROH-cher/ˈprot͡ɕər/
“brother”
Tocharian B; a cousin of English brother and Latin frāter. Proto-Indo-European bh turned into p in Tocharian.
Your name, set in stone
Brahmi writes each consonant with a built-in a. Other vowels are marks added around the consonant, and a small stroke called the virama kills the vowel, so a name ending in a consonant needs one at the end.
A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.
Three things
- The name 'Tocharian' is probably a mistake, from an early identification with the Tokharoi of Bactria.
- Caravan passes from Kucha told checkpoint guards how many people and animals a traveller could take through.
- Tocharian sits geographically farthest east, yet shares features with western branches such as Italic and Celtic.