This work contains the first systematic investigation of the linguistic contacts between Tocharian A and B and Khotanese and Tumshuqese, four languages once spoken in the Tarim Basin, in today’s... Show moreThis work contains the first systematic investigation of the linguistic contacts between Tocharian A and B and Khotanese and Tumshuqese, four languages once spoken in the Tarim Basin, in today’s Xīnjiāng Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China. The main part of the book is devoted to determining a corpus of reliable Khotanese and Tumshuqese loanwords in Tocharian: new borrowing etymologies are proposed, and some old correspondences are rejected. The discussion of the individual loanwords often involves a fresh examination of the text passages where they occur, and, in some cases, it offers lexical insights regarding a variety of neighbouring languages (Chinese, Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, Gāndhārī and Old Uyghur). A detailed phonological, morphological, and semantic analysis of the corpus follows, with a view to determine the phonological correspondences, the relative chronology of the loanwords and possible historical scenarios of cultural exchange. One of the results of this investigation is that the influence of Khotanese and Tumshuqese on Tocharian was much more extensive than previously thought and it spanned over almost two millennia, from the early Iron Age until the extinction of the four languages at the end of the first millennium CE. Show less
This dissertation investigates the linguistic contacts between Tocharian A and B and Khotanese and Tumshuqese, four languages once spoken in the Tarim basin, whose manuscripts can be dated from the... Show moreThis dissertation investigates the linguistic contacts between Tocharian A and B and Khotanese and Tumshuqese, four languages once spoken in the Tarim basin, whose manuscripts can be dated from the 5th to the 10th c. CE. It offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Khotanese and Tumshuqese loanwords in Tocharian A and B. One of the conclusions of this dissertation is that the influence of Khotanese and Tumshuqese on Tocharian was much more extensive than previously thought and it spanned over almost two millennia, from the early Iron Age until the extinction of the four languages at the end of the first millennium CE. In fact, it is possible to distinguish this group of loanwords from the loanwords from Old Steppe Iranian, an unidentified Old Iranian language only known from loanwords into Tocharian, by means of precise sound correspondences. Moreover, the relative chronology of the Khotanese and Tumshuqese loanwords in Tocharian allows a unique glimpse into the linguistic prehistory of the two Eastern Middle Iranian languages. Show less
