Introduction to Tocharian

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Tocharian Online

Series Introduction

Todd B. Krause and Jonathan Slocum

Tocharian denotes two closely related languages of the Indo-European family, denoted simply Tocharian A and Tocharian B . Though quite similar, Tocharian A and B are now considered by most scholars to be two distinct languages, and not merely two dialects of one common language. It is still common practice, however, to use the term Tocharian to refer to both languages when no particular distinction needs to be made. The phrase "the Tocharian language" should be understood in this sense, not as implying any dialectal status of either A or B, but rather as a common euphemism for the two languages considered in terms where their differences are irrelevant.

Note: this set of lessons is for systems/browsers with Unicode® support and fonts spanning the Unicode 3 character set relevant to (Romanized) Tocharian. Lessons rendered in alternate character sets are available via links (Romanized and Unicode 2) in the left margin, and at the bottom of this page.

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Geographic Location

The Tocharian languages were first discovered in documents unearthed in expeditions to Chinese Turkestan (East Turkestan, or Xinjiang); the sites are located along what was once the Silk Road. One primary site of Tocharian remains is Turfan. Turfan lies to the north of the Tarim Basin, a depression situated to the northeast of the Takla Makan Desert. A second major source of Tocharian documents is Kučā, a city to the west of Turfan, in the center of the northern boundary of the Takla Makan Desert. A third major site, Tumšuq, forms the extreme western boundary of Tocharian finds. This lies along the northern rim of the desert, between Kučā and Kašgʰar, a city at the desert's western extreme.

Tocharian A is found only in the region of Turfan and Qārāšahr (Karashahr), a nearby oasis located to the west roughly midway between Turfan and Kučā. Tocharian B, by contrast, is found throughout the entirety of this branch of the Silk Road, from Turfan in the east to Tumšuq in the west. Some sources therefore refer to Tocharian A as East Tocharian or Turfanian , since Turfan is at the easternmost extent of the Tocharian sites. Occasionally it is termed Agnean , referring to the Sanskrit designation Agni for Qārāšahr. In this context, Tocharian B is referred to as West Tocharian (though it is found in the east, too) or Kuchean .

Tocharian Texts

The Tocharian documents all date to a period roughly between the sixth and eighth centuries AD. The materials are predominantly translations of Buddhist texts which were in common circulation in Central Asia. This of course is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, the well-known content assists in the process of decipherment; on the other hand, it provides very little information about the people who spoke the language. There are, however, some texts that are not translations of Buddhist progenitors, including monastic and business letters, caravan passes, and graffiti. These secular documents are all written in Tocharian B, leading some scholars to conclude that Tocharian A, by the time the surviving documents were written, may already have been an extinct language, preserved only as the liturgical language -- much as Latin was, in Europe. The relative paucity of such secular documents, however, necessarily makes such conclusions tentative.

Most of the Tocharian texts were in origin parts of monastic library collections, or left in monasteries as votive offerings. Often, parts of these documents were picked up by the wind and swept out into the desert, making the number of complete Tocharian documents quite small and making the manner of recovery at times haphazard. The Tocharian documents are not found in isolation. Tocharian manuscripts from monastery libraries naturally lie side by side with Sanskrit manuscripts of the same era. At times texts in other languages, such as Old Persian and Uyghur, are found alongside the Tocharian texts. Occasionally documents in gāndʰārī, a Middle Indic language, are found in the same areas, but they date to an earlier era. The texts themselves were predominantly written in a variant of the north Indian Brāhmī script, which was also used for the nearby Middle Iranian language Tumshuqese. There are however some Tocharian B documents that employ Manichean script (used to spread writings of the Manichean religion, which originated in the Mesopotamian region).

The Name "Tocharian"

The name "Tocharian" (German Tocharisch) was proposed first by F. W. K. Müller in 1907, and a year later by the renowned pair of Tocharianists Sieg and Siegling. This name is now thought to be a misnomer, but nevertheless remains due to sheer inertia and the lack of a...