An Overview of Tocharian Studies Over the Past Thirty Years

Chapter 9 Beyond Deciphering: An Overview of Tocharian Studies over the Past Thirty Years

Xu Wenkan

It was in 1892 that the existence of the so-called “Tocharian language,” a branch of the Indo-European language family, came to be known in the West for the first time. In that same year, from the collection of Petrovsky, a Russian consul general to Kashgar, a facsimile manuscript in an unknown language was published in Zapiski Vostochnago Otdyleniya Imperatorkago Russkago Archeologicheskago Obshchestva 7 by the Russian scholar S. F. Oldenburg. The unknown manuscript was written in North Indian Brahmi script. The follow- ing year, the English scholar A. F. R. Hoernle transcribed and identified several Sanskrit words in the manuscript.1 From the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, expeditions from Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan, Sweden, and other countries carried out archaeological explorations in Xinjiang, Gansu, and other places in northwest China, uncovering numerous ancient manuscripts in many languages (mainly discovered in Xinjiang and Dunhuang, Gansu). The most astonishing findings were manuscripts in previously unknown Indo-European languages;2 this started a wave of interest in these manuscripts among European scholars. In 1900, the German scholar Ernst Leumann published an article entitled “Über eine von den unbekannten Literatursprachen Mittelasiens” in Mémories de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de St.-Pétersbourg, VIIIe série IV/8. He included in his article the abovementioned facsimile, as well as another facsimile drawn from the Russian collection. Leumann’s transcription was fairly accurate; he identified several Sanskrit words, and his research demonstrated that the manuscript was a fragment of a translation of a Buddhist sūtra. The Indo-European language investigated by Hoernle and Leumann had previously been unknown, so they referred to it as Unbekannte Sprache I, “Unknown Language I,” and later called it Kaschgarische, “Kashgari,” though both names have since fallen out of use.

1 Hoernle 1893: 1–40. 2 He Changqun 1932/2003: 54–97.

The German Turcologist F. W. K. Müller and the Sanskritologist Emil Sieg played the most important role in continuing the research. In 1907, Müller published a short article entitled “Beitrag zur genaueren Bestimmung der unbekannten Sprachen Mittelasiens” in SBAW 958–960. His identification was based on the colophon of the Uyghur version of Maitreyasamiti (Maitrisimit nom bitig); he called the language Tocharisch, “Tocharian.” Other scholars, for example the Estonian Baron Alexander von Staël-Holstein and the Norwegian S. Konow, argued that the name Tocharian should be applied to the Khotan-Saka language of the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. The next year, 1908, Sieg and another scholar named Wilhelm Siegling published a famous article called “Tokharische,”3 in which agreement was expressed on the name put forward by Müller. Especially important is that these two scholars put forth proof that Tocharian comprises an indepen- dent branch of the Indo-European language family, divided into two dialects: Tocharian A and Tocharian B, and that though this language was spoken in the East, it had characteristics of Western Indo-European languages, particularly Italian and Celtic. For example, this language preserved the postulated palatal characteristics of hard palatal sounds, such as *k, *ĝ, *ĝh (Tocharian A känte, Tocharian B kante are similar to Greek hekaton and Latin centum). This marked the emergence of Tocharology, with 2008 its 100th anniversary. The discovery and decipherment of Tocharian was one of the seminal events in twentieth-century Indo-European historical comparative linguistics. Its significance is comparable to that of the uncovering and decipherment of Hittite and other Anatolian languages. Tocharian and Hittite have some com- mon features; for example, in both languages, “r” is a marker of the passive mood. Generally speaking, the study of Hittite and the Anatolian languages is more mature than the study of Tocharian. Because the prior achievements of Assyriology had laid a foundation, the study of Hittite received greater atten- tion from linguists studying the Indo-European languages. Tocharian studies were only able to reach this level of maturity after great labor was expended. However, after 1908, substantial progress was seen in research on Tocharian as is evident from publications. In 1921, Sieg and Siegling published Tocharische Sprachreste, a work that includes numerous facsimiles from the Tocharian A fragments preserved in the Berlin collection. In 1931, in cooperation with Indo-Europeanist William Schulz, they published Tocharische Grammatik (Tocharian Grammar), a work more than five hundred pages in length. Still, the publication of the Tocharian B fragments was postponed until Tocharische Spracheste and SpracheB were finally published in 1949 and 1953, respectively.

3 Sieg and Siegling 1908: 915–932.