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Tocharo-Sinica

Language Log 2024-05-13

Language Log has been fortunate to have had several guest posts and numerous comments by Douglas Adams, doyen of Tocharian studies in America (see "Selected readings" for a sampling).  Now, stimulated by the recent post on Chinese chariotry, he has written the following ruminations in response.

I read with interest the material on early Chinese chariotry.  It was far outside my competence to judge.  As you knew, I was most interested in the comment that was looking to the possibility of Tocharian > Chinese lexical borrowings.  As you also know, it has long been my suspicion that there was more west > east influence on Chinese language and culture than is generally realized.  And the "westerners" involved were most likely to have been Tocharians of one sort or another ("Tocharian D"?).  It's probably not only PIE pigs and honey that, via Tocharian, show up in Chinese.

It's a pity that the ancient Chinese, like the ancient Greeks, were so totally uninterested in the "barbarian" languages that were their neighbors.  We have our single sentence example of the Jie language recorded, not in a difficult Greek alphabet transcription, but rather in an inscrutable Chinese character transcription.  (Inscrutable because reconstructing pre-Middle-Chinese Chinese phonology makes reconstructing PIE phonology look like child's play.)  Adding to the problem of course is that Chinese phonology, at all times, renders that incorporation of foreign words possible only at the cost of (considerable) deformation.  Look, for instance, at how poor Buddhacinga's name is rendered (Fótúchéng 佛圖澄 [many people used to mispronounce that Fótúdèng]) (ca. 232–348 AD) .  Who would have guessed?

I'm still suspicious that the name given by the Chinese to the Kuchean royal house, Bai, may be connected to the homophonous designation of the "barbarian" rulers surrounding the nascent Chinese state on the North China Plain.  And, speaking of royalty, is it possible that wang 'king' might be from pre-Tocharian *wnatke (TchA nātäk 'lord'), which in turn might be cognate with Greek (w)anakt– '[Mycenean] king.' (TchA nāśi 'lady' would equally be the equivalent of Greek (w)anassa 'queen' from pre-Greek *wanakyā-, both irregularly related to 'king/lord' [where's the *-t-?].  The latter word survives in Modern Greek in pant-anassa 'all-queen,' an epithet of the Virgin Mary.)  But, even if true, who's going to believe it?

This is but a taste of what is to come.  Doug is preparing a paper that touches on one of these subjects at greater length.  It is tentatively titled "Resurrecting an Etymology: Greek (w)ánax ‘king’ and Tocharian A nātäk ‘lord’" and will probably appear in Sino-Platonic Papers sometime this summer.

 

Selected readings