On Sat, 20 Oct 2001 19:42:35 -0700 (PDT), george knysh
<
gknysh@...> wrote:
>What do linguists say about the possible location of
>the Tokharians before their trek eastward? And
>therefore about the state of IE at that time (this may
>entail some repetition but can one ever have enough of
>a good thing?)
From a linguistic point of view there is very little that can be said
directly about either locations or timelines. From the study of a
language and comparison with related and neighbouring languages, one
can get an impression about the degree of relationship and/or the
degree of interaction, but even here there are no measurements,
nothing that translates to hard figures. I suppose every linguist
involved in studying the IE lgs. has his/her own impressionistic idea
about the internal branching structure of the IE family, based on
weighing and averaging hundreds of little facts. The following is my
impression, without all the little facts, because that would take too
long to write down.
One thing almost every one agrees on is that the oldest split is
between Anatolian and the rest of the family. "Non-Anatolian IE" as a
whole went through several innovations that are not reflected in the
Anatolian languages (it must be said that there is still a school of
thought that claims that Anatolian once had these features too, but
lost them). The next to break away would be Tocharian. After that,
there is no clear discontinuity anymore. It seems that the other IE
languages, after having said goodbye to Anatolian, and after losing
track of Tocharian wandering off to the east, kept influencing each
other for quite some time. The size of the area occupied by the
various groups would have been to great for this to be an
everybody-influencing-everybody-else scenario, but it seems clear that
one group still had contact with the next group, which was still in
contact with the next, etc. That's why it's hard to discern a clear
structure. The only two that stand out significantly are in my
opinion Germanic and Armenian. Both share a similar sound system (*t
= /th/, *d = /t/) and both lack certain grammatical features that are
important elsewhere (e.g. the sigmatic aorist), despite the fact that
one of them is centum, and the other satem. One way to explain this
is if both of them were peripheral languages, having less contact with
the IE center. For the rest, all one can say is that Celtic was in
contact with Italic, Italic in contact with Hellenic, and Hellenic in
contact with Indo-Iranian, and that Indo-Iranian shares at least the
satem isogloss with Balto-Slavic, Albanian (etc.) [and Armenian].
There are other mutual influences, but I would consider those to be of
a later date (e.g. Germanic/Balto-Slavic, Hellenic/Armenian/Albanian).
So, coming back to Tocharian, I would say that they must have lost
contact with the rest of IE after Anatolian (for which I use the
archaeological anchor of 5500 BC, start of the LBK-phase), but before
or at the same time as the gradual differentiation of Germanic and
Armenian began in their respectives niches of the PIE homeland. I
have no idea what the Armenian niche might have been, but the Germanic
one is pretty clearly Denmark/South-Sweden after the assimilation of
the Ertebölle/Ellerbek-folk, ca. 4000 BC [NB: this does *not* mean
that I assign a date of 4000 BC to Proto-Germanic itself. The
language was still in contact with other IE peoples (e.g. very much so
during the Corded Ware phase) and evolved gradually into something
that we can begin to call Proto-Germanic by ca. 3000-2500, and which
remained in situ until Germanic started to expand ca. 1000-500 BC
(Common Germanic)].
Tocharian must have started out then as an easterly IE tribe roughly
between 5000-4000 BC, maybe as one of the IE-speaking elements I was
talking about, infiltrated from the LBK/TRB zone, within the
archaeological context of the Dnipro-Donets or Serednyj Stih cultures,
or perhaps of the sub-Neolithic cultures further north (Comb-pricked
Ware, etc.). Afanasievo is dated to ca. 3000 BC, so if those were
indeed the Proto-Tocharians, that would give them plenty of time to
get there.