As I said a few years ago, Tocharian is one of the Indo-European languages I’ve found most intriguing; now Ali Jones at Phys.org writes about a very promising project called TheTocharianTrek:
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.
[Professor Michaël] 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.
The project is also piecing together which languages left the PIE community first and when. As their work enters its final phase, the researchers agree with the theory that the Tocharians may well have left the PIE family second and certainly well after the Anatolians, a group of ancient languages once spoken in present-day Turkey.
The piece goes on to discuss weather terminology and says:
The ultimate goal is to create an atlas that maps where the words were used and when. The completed atlas is due to be available on the university’s website beginning in late 2023.
Exciting stuff — thanks, Dmitry!
This study by Peyrot, from 2019, argues for contact between Proto-Tocharian and Proto-Uralic, on typological grounds. I would be curious to know what Uralists think about it.
The general gist of Uralic influence seems to hold up, I haven’t seen anyone outright question it, though many details remain debated.
Tocharian loanwords in Samoyedic remain probably underresearched; there’s been a decent number of recent proposals from TTT member Abel Warries and I’ve got a handful of unpublished finds myself around too. So far no finds of loanwords in the opposite direction though, interestingly enough! but maybe more lexicographic work will help with that.
Something getting from Tocharian even into Ugric (or into Hungarian, Mansi, Khanty separately) could be possible, has really not been checked systematically by anyone; there seems to be nothing already into Proto-Uralic though.
@Y: Thanks!
The uralicist hath spoken. I’ll just for the sake of discussion say that it’s interesting, but it’s based on internal reconstruction and should be backed up by other evidence. Another thought is that this looks like a Sprachbund with Yukaghir as a more peripheral member. One objection would be that it’s hard to imagine especially Yeniseian going through a Sprachbund phase without clear traces of syntactic borrowing or morphological leveling.
I vaguely recall some scholarship which suggests that Yeniseian was spoken considerably further to the south in prehistory. In that case, there would be no need for it to be immediately adjacent to pre-Tocharian and pre-Samoyedic during their time of contact.
No, between Pre-Tocharian and “an early form of Samoyedic”. (Open access! I read the paper a few years ago and recommend it.)
When the grammar is just too different, such things may not happen. Basque and the surrounding Romance languages have basically been spending the last 2000 years approaching their sound systems to each other’s. Grammar? Nope. OK, Basque has been emphasizing “and” (ta) over the comitative case in the last 3 or so centuries, but if that’s all…
I haven’t seen that outside of attempts to tie to, specifically, Burushaski and often also to the archaeological Karasuk culture.
David M.: When the grammar is just too different, such things may not happen. Basque and the surrounding Romance languages have basically been spending the last 2000 years approaching their sound systems to each other’s. Grammar? Nope.
Point. It also occured to me that if Yeniseian instead is a common substrate, carrying the sound system over would be expected, bringing morphology along well nigh impossible.
More on Afanasievo and Tocharians, starting with the comments:
Indo-European and the Yamnaya
They Perished Like Avars (a comment I meant to leave in another thread)
Son of Yamnaya (obviously)
A study from last year that I hadn’t seen:
Kumar et al: Bronze and Iron Age population movements underlie Xinjiang population history, Science (2022)
The paper isn’t easy to follow, or trawl for details on single elements, but it seems that the Afanasievo, the Okuneva (who were their neighbours up north in the Minusinsk Basin) and the Chemurcheck (who took up nomadic herding on the Western Mongolian Plateau after learning animal husbandry from them) may have formed an economic and political community, with the Afanasievo as an initially dominant minority element. This multi-culture could well have become linguistically Afanasievan (Indo-European) with an Okunevan (e.g. Yeniseian) substrate. They spread out in a wide region around the Altai searching for pastures and presumably copper ore. We find them in the Early Bronze Age in the fertile Ili Valley in Western Sinkiang. With the advent of the Iron Age about 1000 BCE they seem to have been replaced or subdued by the Saka, and I don’t where they went after that, but they leave written documents along the northern rim of the Tarim basin, just across the Tian-Shan range, from around 400 CE.
I learn that recent archaeology in the Ili valley divide the metal age into an Andronovo era (c. 1900-1000 BCE) and a Saka era (after c. 1000 BCE). That might weaken my assertion about continuity from the early Bronze Age, but I’ll note that there’s some debate (as always) over whether the Andronovo phase is echt Andronovo or a local development influenced by it. It may be more scathing that there’s no evidence of metal work older than c. 1900 BCE. But absence of evidence etc.
Zhi, Festa: Archaeological Research in the Ili Region: A Review, Asian Perspective (2020)
Wang et al: Copper metallurgy in prehistoric upper Ili Valley Xinjiang China, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (2019)
On the upside, it’s in open access, unlike the last few Science papers in this thread!
Remarkable amounts of Anatolian Farmer ancestry – up to 43%.
Yes, in some. I don’t have the paper in front of me, but I think those are believed to be Sintashta (or maybe Andronovo) Indo-Iranians. I gave up trying to unite all data for each individual.
Me: We find them in the Early Bronze Age in the fertile Ili Valley in Western Sinkiang. With the advent of the Iron Age about 1000 BCE they seem to have been replaced or subdued by the Saka, and I don’t where they went after that,
No, that’s not it. Except from this single skeleton which they say is unadmixed Afanasievo, the other finds that are archaeologically Afanasievo or Chemurcheck are concentrated up north. These cluster together in the PCA plot. I’m confused because the “pure” specimen is rather like Sintashta. But in the admixture bars they all look the same. I guess there are things going on that isn’t shown in the plots.
Looking at the PCA plots I’m leaning towards the old suggestion that the Tocharians are the Wusun. They show up at the eastern end of the Silk Road, together with the Yueshi, a couple of centuries BCE, when the Han start pitting the steppe peoples up against eachother. Maybe this is the old alliance of Afanasievo and Chemurcheck?
Anyhow, the Wusun and the Yueshi start fighting eachother, and then moving westwards in turns under pressure from the Xiongnu. The Yueshi first took the Ili Valley from the Saka. Then the Wusun took it from the Yueshi. The Yueshi then went on to Bactria and founded empires, while the Wusun stayed and eventually were allowed to form a sort of buffer state between the Xiongnu and Han China, sinking gradually into obscurity. This is exactly the period when the Tocharian languages are attested.
This Wikipedia page has a “Chemurchek culture and contemporary cultures and polities” map, useful for those of us who have a hard time keeping in mind which culture was where. (Can’t link to the map directly — all the labels disappear.)
Or maybe the Tocharians are both the Yueshi and the Wusun, if the fallout and breakup were messy, if either A or B is a Yueshi stay-behind group, or if either represents the local delegation of the Kushan empire.
That history of the Wusun and Yuezhi* peoples is just my summary of (mostly) Wikipedia. Ideally, this is where John Emerson would join in with all the Yuezhi details from Chinese, Mongolian, and Tibetan sources.
* Did I write ‘Yueshi’ up there? So I did. I devoice on your lousy Pinyin!
Aren’t the Yuezhi more likely the Actual Tocharians, the ones who wrote an Iranian language in the Unknown Kharoṣṭhī script?
…in… the… Son of Yamnaya thread.
The Kushan Script Deciphered this July. I was just pondering how to think about that.
Oh. Remarkable how I half-remembered that and mixed it up with the knife reported on LLog.
(Can’t link to the map directly — all the labels disappear.)
Yeah, wp seems to have a real problem with maps. The thumbnails on the page are too small to read. Magnifying in-situ is temperamental[**]. (I got it to work eventually.) Clicking gives you a full-screen map with no labels — useless.
[**] And randomly magnifies other wp pages you might have open.
Chrome, at least, and maybe Firefox, have the feature that the zoom level is shared between pages with the same host name. I’m not sure if “wp” here is Wikipedia or WordPress, but it would certainly be a thing for separate blogs hosted under wordpress.
com. (Wheras blogs with their own boughten domain name would not share zoom levels, even if actually hosted on wordpress.\code/>com).__________
(*) so called
Ha, my trick worked (writing
wordpress.<code/>comto avoid autolinking), but I misspelled it the second time and forgot to check inside the edit window….Oops, sorry, that depends on how considerable “considerable” is. The evidence from hydronyms is clear that Yeniseian drifted north in historical times; but the names don’t extend as far south as where the Karasuk culture once was, IIRC.