The Tocharians are not the only "lost
tribe" of centum-speakers in the east, and it's easy to see how such groups
could originate. The "Satem shift" was an innovation that did not
necessarily take place at the eastern periphery of Indoeuropia, even
if it spread from an eccentrically located core area. The
innovation split the outgroups that did not participate in it, leaving a
large continuous area unaffected in the west (with Anatolian having remained in
the south long before), and isolating several conservative languages in the
east. Hellenic is another centum branch that went astray (I'd include Phrygian
as a not-very-distant cousin of Greek, and Ancient Macedonian as Greek's
sister). The recently discovered and still controversial centum substrate
(apparently neither Tocharian nor Hellenoid) in Bangani, a Western Pahari
Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Indian Himalayas, may represent another
extinct branch in those parts. Here are links to pages describing the Bangani
scandal:
As for the Tocharians, I think it would be
premature to connect them with concrete archaeological stuff or reconstruct
their prehistoric migration routes until the derivation of the Afanasievo
culture and other related units of southwestern Siberia and Kazachstan
becomes clearer; however, given the evidently archaic character of
Tocharian, a separation date about 4000 BC (say, in an
early Funnel Beaker cultural context) would make sense to me. The
Tocharians certainly had "wheels" -- that's what they called their
wagons (kukAl, kokale < *kWekWlo-) and shared the (non-Anatolian?) IE
word for "horse" (yuk, yakwe < *ek^wos).
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2001 8:11 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: The Tokharians
Outliers are outliers.
If you can't explain them, you just live with them -- while making full use of
their testimony for IE studies.
Look at Romany, an Indic language found
in Europe, clear to Ireland; imagine how we would be scratching our heads if the
Indo-Iranian branch were a tiny, and now otherwise extinct branch of IE. We are
similarly at a loss to explain how Armenian got to Armenia.