Tocharian and Anatolian - Do They Form Their Own Branch on the Indo-European Tree? 🔍
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- Опубликовано: 23 окт 2023
- In this (hopefully) thought-provoking video, I explore the intriguing, and for sure controversial, possibility of Tocharian and Anatolian forming a distinct branch on the Indo-European language🌳. While this idea is FAR, FAR from being set in stone, I couldn't help but notice some compelling lexical and phonological similarities between these two ancient language groups during a recent cold and sore throat that left me stuck in bed for a few days, allowing me to get deeply stuck into reading about Tocharian. 🤒📚
I also stumbled upon a couple of articles that support the idea of a deeper connection between Tocharian and Anatolian. The first one, "Hittite and Tocharian" by Petersen (1933), is a true gem of linguistic scholarship, standing the test of time over its 90 years of existence. Petersen's work provides a comprehensive analysis of the arguments supporting a potential 'dialectical unity' of Anatolian and Tocharian. Interestingly, it was in this text that I encountered the earliest mention of the possible lengthening of stops in Anatolian, a concept that has since become a popular research area, explored by scholars like Alwin Kloekhorst in contemporary times. This work has also been cited by Melchert, Adams, and Jasanoff, although it's worth noting that none of them seem to have paid much attention to the core idea of the text.
The second text that caught my eye was "West-Indo-European Affinities of Anatolian" by Jaan Puhvel (1994). Puhvel's meticulous examination delves into the relationship between Anatolian and the West-Indo-European group, of which he considers Tocharian to be a part.
Additionally, I came across a more recent work by Kassian, Zhivlov, Starostin, and others (2021), which presents an extensive reconstruction of Indo-European phylogeny based on substantial wordlists. In this article, Kassian explores a potentially alternative relationship between Tocharian and Hittite. 📝🧐
In my video, I also discuss recent research by Kloekhorst on the Anatolian stop system and Heggarty's (controversial) article. While the authors may not explicitly state a joint Tocharian and Anatolian clade, the evidence, especially in Kloekhorst's work, seems to hint at a potential reconstruction of the Anatolian stop system that aligns neatly (albeit, not perfectly) with Tocharian.
I want to emphasize that my primary position still leans toward Tocharian and Anatolian forming separate branches on the Indo-European language tree, perhaps breaking off together in close temporal proximity. However, it's always worth revisiting ideas like those presented by Petersen and Puhvel in light of modern discoveries and linguistic research to see if there are any valuable insights to be gained.
Please share your views and opinions in the comment section. I would love to read your ideas.
Particularily concerning what type of evidence we need to justify a joint branch and whether the shared characteristics of Anatolian and Tocharian might shed new light on how PIE is reconstructed.
What do you think is the closest relative to Tocharian? 💬🤝
I apologize for my croaky voice during the video (I’m feeling better now and my voice will be normal for the next video!), and if the video jumps around a bit, it’s because I actually recorded about 75 minutes of me talking into the camera! I cut it down to something a lot more manageable! I also left out some of the concepts discussed in Peterson's article as, upon review, I felt I did a bad job of representing the ideas from the text. 🙏🎥
Very Selected Reading List 📜 (In order of importance according to me) 📜
⭐ Petersen, W. (1933). Hittite and Tocharian. Language.
⭐ Puhvel, Jaan. (1994). West-Indo-European affinities of Anatolian. Früh-, Mittel-, Spätindogermanisch.
⭐ Kassian, A., et al. (2021). Rapid radiation of the inner Indo-European languages: an advanced approach to Indo-European lexicostatistics.
Kloekhorst, A. (2016). The Anatolian stop system and the Indo-Hittite hypothesis.
Paul Heggarty et al. (2023) ,Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages.
Peyrot, M. (2019). The deviant typological profile of the Tocharian branch of Indo-European may be due to Uralic substrate influence. Indo-European Linguistics.
⭐ Jäntti, O. The Position of Anatolian in Indo-European: An Overview. Leiden University, MA Comparative Indo-European Linguistics
Adams, D. Q. (1984). The Position of Tocharian among the Other Indo-European Languages. Journal of the American Oriental Society.
Peyrot, M. (2018). Interrogative stems in Hittite and Tocharian. Indogermanische Forschungen.
Ringe, D., Warnow, T. and Taylor, A. (2002), Indo-European and Computational Cladistics.
Sturtevant, E. H. (1929). The Relationship of Hittite to Indo-European.
Jasanoff, Jay H. (2003). Hittite and the Indo-European verb.
Blog mentioned in video:
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...
Music-
Sao Meo - Doug Maxwell_ Zac Zinger 
Развлечения
So what are your thoughts on a potential Anatolian/Tocharian branch? Please check out the description for some extra explanation behind this video. I'm not convinced Anatolian and Tocharian do form their own branch but I enjoyed looking into the possibility!
A few extra reading resources:
Jasanoff, Jay H. 2003. Hittite and the Indo-European verb. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.
Bouckaert, R., Lemey, P., Dunn, M., Greenhill, S. J., Alekseyenko, A. V., Drummond, A. J., Gray, R. D., Suchard, M. A., & Atkinson, Q. D. (2012). Mapping the origins and expansion of the Indo-European language family. Science (New York, N.Y.), 337(6097), 957-960.
Carling, G. (2005). Proto-Tocharian, Common Tocharian, and Tocharian - on the value of linguistic connections in a reconstructed language. In K. Jones-Bley (Ed.), Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference: Los Angeles, November 5-6, 2004 (pp. 47-71). Journal of Indo-European Studies, Monograph 52.
Jasanoff, Jay. 2017. The Impact of Hittite and Tocharian: Rethinking Indo-European in the 20th
Century and Beyond. In Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics,
edited by Jared Klein, Brian Joseph, and Matthias Fritz, 31-53. Munich: Walter de Gruyter
Gray, R., Atkinson, Q. Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin. Nature 426, 435-439 (2003).
I think the main issue with connecting Tocharian and Anatolian into one branch is that Anatolian doesn't seem to have developed the typical indo-european gender system yet. In all the non-anatolian branches a derivation of -eh₂ became the typical feminine marker and -os the masculine, but from what I've heard this is more of a animate inanimate distinction is Anatolian
You're right, evidence for the feminine in Anatolian is meagre at best.
I think Tocharian is higly influenced by the uralic substrate, that is probably the motivation of devoicing and de aspiration.
Being a historian by background, I can't speak with much knowledge about this, *but* I reckon that the preservation of various archaic features in Anatolian, Tocharian, and Italo-Celtic branches could be explained by relatively early branching of those sub-families and would I suppose suggest a closer degree of relation-- that Tocharian is in effect "in-between" Anatolian and Italo-Celtic. I have read a paper that argued Tocharian was influenced by Uralic as it moved east. I have also read that Germanic could have Uralic influence, perhaps as a substrate. So if both of those arguments are correct, Tocharian and Germanic could *appear* to be more related to each other by virtue of (presumably) separate instances of Uralic influence-- in other words, they could be more typologically similar than they are genetically related through common origin and similar contact histories.
Douglas Q. Adams is not to be confused with the frood who knows where his towel is.
A really interesting idea, since the Anatolian family and Tocharian both seem to have branched off from Yamnaya, rather than Corded Ware, which is where most of the remaining IE languages can be traced to. So your theory makes sense for several reasons. Great video!
Oh that's actually quite interesting and something I didn't know about, I'll have to read up on it. Thanks!
@@LearnHittite Yeah, I recommend getting familiar with these two archeological horizons, and their paternal DNA, it adds quite a bit to the story.
I don't think the Anatolian branch comes from Yamnaya. Genetics and archaeology certainly does not point to that.
For me Anatolian and Tocharian are most likely Pre-Yamnaya branches, Proto-Anatolian may have been spoken by the Suvorovo, which pre-dates Yamnaya and Proto-Tocharian was spoken by the Afanasievo, which originated from Yamnaya's predecessor, the Repin culture.
I'd say at least some Paleo-Balkan languages came directly from Yamnaya.
@@Nastya_07 Possible. The main thing for me is that they're not Corded Ware, which is interesting.
Kloek ( Clook ) Horst a clook is a hen, a horst is a small hight in the landscape, as in english horst, it is probably and old name for a farm on a low hill... so Kloek with oe as in shoe, and horst like english horst but pronounsed with o as in forced it rhymes with forced even kloek rhymes with book, it either means hen, or kloek as in "brave" a ridder ( Knight) can be Kloek (brave).
I find some morphological similarities with Balto-Slavic, IMO
-eh2 past tense marker (also Italic)
R(o:)-eh2-ye verbs abundant (IV present), mostly as in Slavic
-yeh2 feminine stems into TB -(i)ye, just like Baltic -e: feminine nouns
plus some possible -eh2-o:n stems as in Germanic, TB -o nouns with umlaut
and the -eh2 subjunctive as Italo-Celtic
All in all it looks like a northern IE language to me, but these observations could be just retention instead of common innovation.
Great exposition, thanks! I understand that you said that you're not focused on phonology, but I understand that Tocharian still contains the tripartite gender system of the rest of IE, which means that the feminine gender would have to have formed in the short span between the splitting of Anatolian and Tocharian.
In any case, I think that it would more-or-less cause it to be grouped with the rest of IE rather than together with Anatolian essentially because of that. I'm not wedded to the idea, though, and if the Indo-Europeanists conclude the opposite, I'll just take the consensus as being more reasonable than my own opinion.
Im no expert but I understand that the tocharian gender is like tocharian case system, it's very different from the rest of IE....
You raise an excellent point about gender - I kinda overlooked it I think. Over the weekend I'm going to try an get my head around 'The Feminine Gender in Tocharian and Indo-European' - by Ronald Kim but as of yet I haven't had chance to give it much consideration.
And thanks for your kind words!
🙂
This would square well with the old theory of W.B.Henning, that the original speakers of proto-Tocharian language were in fact Gutian nomads who invaded Mesopotamia in the late 3rd millennium BC, and established there their short-lived barbarian dynasty, much to the chagrin of Sumerian scribes recording the names of their kings. And while Henning's evidence isn't much more substantial than for yours, I think you're both on the right track, and that ancient Tocharians - whoever these people really were - ought to be considered - together with Anatolians - as really the first off-shoots of Indo-Europeans who trailblazed through history; not just as a strange isolate that branched off in Siberia millennias ago, and then spent the rest of their history squatting in Tarim Basin.
Arsi, has the same root meaning as Arian and Irish might it mean "folks" , "diets" etc...
I am one of the 20 Dutch viewers. Your pronunciation of Kloekhorst is not so bad. Dutch oe is pronounced as a short English oo. The similarities in the stop system make some linguists wonder whether the protolanguage had aspirate stops at all. In my view the oldest language is not necessarily the most conservative or archaic one. I think there are more data that point to aspirate stops than to a voiceless and glottal stop system.
Cheers, I asked my friend who is a dutch speaker to give me the pronunciation and tried to copy as best as I could but to be honest I find pronunciation difficult in every language, guess I'm tone deaf! So if I understand correctly you see PIE as having voiceless, voiced and aspirate stops or just two of the three?
@@LearnHittite As a Dutchman, I'd represent the pronunciation of "Kloekhorst" in IPA as /'kluk.hɔrst/.
In Dutch orthography, "oe" spells the monophtong /u/, not a diphtong /ʊə/.
toh cha ri an, in dutch we pronounce the ch as in loCH... But it is not the real name of the language anyways... the tocharians dressed up like the scottish by the way....and looked European... It might be a sister language of Indo European...
Great video! You do sound ill though, get well soon
I'm feeling much better 🙂
You make some interesting points but you don't seem convinced and you don't mention in the video why you're not 100% behind this idea. What are your reservations exactly?
Great reading list too in particular the Petersen text.
Well, simply because many branching models show Tocharian as splitting second, shortly after Anatolian and I dont see much reason to dispute that. I think I said it somewhere in the video that that is probably the explanation behind many of the shared characteristics. Also I think there's a question mark around the nature of stops in PIE which further muddies the water. Thanks for your kind words also 💪👍
Why shouldn't we consider both time and geography? There's no way Tocharian is close to Germanic, Italo-Celtic, or Balto-Slavic. It's always seemed to me to be closest to Anatolian PIE languages and Indo-Aryan.
I agree completely
@@LearnHittite Also, this is the first time I've heard that the Indo-Iranian languages are thought to be younger than Germanic or Balto-Slavic. Is this really the consensus? I've always thought, with how old and diffused the Indo-Iranian languages are, that they are at least older than the Celto-Italic branch.
The proto-Anatolians went south, and the proto-Tocharians went east. So no, can't be a single branch.
in my view anatolian languages should be also compared with agglunitative languages like turkish and hungarian...hittite was an agglunitative language i think,i found lots of common stem phrases from both turkish,english and german,just by comparing the words from a youtube video,i love languages... if only mummies could speak,they would tell,what happened,and when,who spoke what...hungarian has lots of loan words from slavic,but both turkish...it has germanic words too...i think,the uralic and indo european languages should be studied together...maybe tocharian and hittite both served as a bridge for the two language families,namely uralic and germanic.i also strongly suggest and believe,that scholars who study ancient languages and compare their scripts and tablets,must learn and know at least english,german,turkish and hungarian in order to see which one was affected by whom...i dont know hungarian,but by comparing turkish and hungarian i noticed,some words are similiar,some are the same,and some are germanic!the same is true for hittite...dont know much about tocharian,but it took both suffixes and prefixes,so under the effect of greek maybe?while hittite i heard is agglunitative...why is it considered indo european,then,if its an agglûnitative language,and has also similiarity to uralic words?an expert would help,but free from politics,otherwise it would turn into the eurovision song contest,and would only be wrongly or poorly classified...i also heard that tocharian is the root of the uygur language,so the two must be compared as well...
I, too, befound some Germanic words looking alike Turkish words. However, if there be a bond between the two tongues, I think it would have been afound by now. Futher, the words looking alike may be Wanderwörter. This is true for some words like sugar, copper, wine, and goose. And there is a belithe that the tongues yond the world follow, that is they first begin as agglunitatice, then orwallow as fusional, and, after that, they become analitic. The rede why Turkic tongues have not orwallowed like the belithe is their speakers’ life-rede.