Dreaming of Tocharian.

Nelson Goering in a Facebook post showed an image of a footnote from Kuśiññe Kantwo: Elementary Lessons in Tocharian B by Michael Weiss (p. xx fn. 31) that I couldn’t resist posting here:

Don Ringe related the following story, which he heard from Warren Cowgill: In the early course of the decipherment “Sieg could tell from the names in a Tocharian text he was working on that it was a Buddhist text, but he couldn’t figure out which. One night he dreamt that he got up, went to his library, took a particular book, opened it to a particular page, and there was the Sanskrit parallel. Upon waking he did exactly that and found the parallel.” The story may be apocryphal, but names have often played a key role in decipherment from Grotefend’s and Champollion’s day on.

(Cowgill was the director of my ill-fated dissertation half a century ago.) Weiss’s book looks useful and readable; the preface begins:

There are now many excellent resources for learning the structure and grammar of the Tocharian languages, but there are few resources for learning to read the languages. The natural person to write such an introductory textbook would be one of the great Tocharianists, but they have better things to do. So, on the principle “fools rush in, etc.,” I’ve put together twenty lessons that will introduce the basic grammar of Tocharian B — generally regarded as the more archaic and interesting of the two languages for Indo-European purposes — and a vocabulary of about 500 words. The first ten lessons present the rudiments of the synchronic phonology, morphology, and major syntactic topics. Lessons 11-20 cover some diachronic topics and continue the presentation of the syntax. My models are the bare-bones introductory texts of yesteryear (Perry, Quin, the original Wheelock) and the excellent Sanskrit samizdat of Craig Melchert.

And here’s what he has to say about the names of the languages:

The name Tocharian is a misnomer. The true Tocharians (Gk. Τόχαροι Tókharoi Strabo 11.8.2 ~ Τάχοροι Tákhoroi Ptolemy 6.12.4; Lat. Tochari Justinus 42.2.2 ~ Thocari Pliny Nat. 6.55, Athagorae Ammianus Marcellinus 23.6.66; Skt. Tukhāra- ~ Tuṣāra; Chin. 吐火羅 Mand. Tǔhuǒluó; Tibet. Thod-gar) were an ethnic unit responsible for the founding of the Kushan empire in Bactria.

F. W. K. Müller (1907) gave the name “Tocharian” to our language for the following reason: two versions of a text known as the Maitreya-samiti-nāṭaka- ‘The Play about the Meeting with Maitreya- (a future Buddha)’ were found, one in Old Uyghur, the other in Tocharian A. The colophon of the Tocharian A text named the vaibhāṣika Āryacandra as the arranger. But the colophon of the Uyghur version claimed that it was the Uyghur translation of the arrangement of Vaibazaki Ariacintri born in the land of Agnideśa- (i.e. Yānqí) from the Indian language into the Twqry language.

Hence it seems clear that the Uyghurs called Tocharian A Twqry. The phonetic interpretation of the Uyghur spelling is ambiguous since the letter transcribed as q can represent either a voiced or voiceless consonant. But renderings of the name in the Sogdian alphabet, which distinguishes between [γ] and [χ], clarify that the consonant after the first vowel was a voiced velar fricative. The Sogdian Karabalgasun inscription refers to the ctβ’r twγr’ystn ‘the four twγr’y-stans’, to designate the area around Qarašahr. So at a minimum the Old Uyghur and Sogdian languages used a form of the shape [t-rounded vowel-γ-r-vowel] to designate the area around Yānqí. But this name is not directly superimposable on the Skt. Tukhāra-, which has a voiceless velar and a long vowel in the second syllable.

The native designation for Tocharian B appears to have been kᵤśiññe ‘Kuchean’ or kᵤśiñ ‘of Kuca’. We find kᵤśiñ-pele ‘in the manner of Kuca’ (PK M 500.1 62) parallel to yentukäñe-pele ‘in the Indian manner’, i.e. in Sanskrit. One sometimes sees Tocharian B called Kuchean in older literature.

The native designation for Tocharian A appears to have been ārśi-käntu ‘tongue of ārśi-‘ (A 229, THT 26 862 b 7), i.e. the language of the land of ārśi (ārśi-ype, THT 1152 a 2) centered around Qarašahr. In Chinese the city is called 焉耆, Mand. Yānqí. Sanskrit texts call this kingdom Agni-viṣaya- or Agni-deśa-. Hence one sometimes sees Tocharian A called Agnean in older literature.

The Wiktionary page for 焉耆 (Yānqí) has an interesting etymology:

Possibly from Proto-Tocharian *Ārke-, name of the historical capital city of the Agneans, which gave rise to the endonym in Tocharian A Ārśi (Adams, 2013; see also Ji, 1998v4). First attested in the Book of Han. In Sanskrit sources, the city’s name is conflated with अग्नि (agni, “fire”), which was likely unrelated.

(N.b.: I am planning on publishing my own derivation of Yānqí from Eng. Yankee, proving that the Tocharians originated in New England, so keep it under your hats for now.)