{"id":356,"date":"2011-03-24T20:50:36","date_gmt":"2011-03-25T03:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=356"},"modified":"2011-04-02T22:21:15","modified_gmt":"2011-04-03T05:21:15","slug":"tocharian-700-ad-n-w-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/24\/tocharian-700-ad-n-w-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Tocharian — 700 AD, N.W. China"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Tocharian "cha"<\/p><\/div>\n

In the early part of the 20th century, archeologist Aurel Stein<\/a> discovered manuscripts in northwestern China in a script that had been lost for centuries, in a language that which completely stunned the linguistic community.<\/p>\n

The first surprise was that it was an Indo-European language.\u00a0 That wasn’t such a huge surprise, since the Greeks had come tromping through almost 1000 years earlier, Northwest China was along the Silk Route not far from the historically powerful Indo-European-speaking Farsi speakers and the Indo-European-speaking Sanskrit speakers.<\/p>\n

The second surprise was that it wasn’t Greek or Greek-derived, nor Farsi or Farsi-derived, nor Sanskrit or Sanskrit-derived.\u00a0 It appeared that it had been in the area for an awfully long time, not that some e.g. Finns took a wrong turn somewhere in 500 BC; Tocharian was a completely novel language.<\/p>\n

The third, and biggest surprise, is that its structure was closer to the -European side of the Indo-European languages than to the Indo- side, despite being geographically closer to the areas that spoke languages on the Indo- side.<\/p>\n

Despite the language being clearly European-ish, the writing system is Asian: it is an abugida (with “a” as the implied vowel)\u00a0 clearly derived from Brahmi; most of the surviving (and found) documents in Tocharian were translations of Sanskrit Buddhist documents.<\/p>\n

Tocharain script had extra decorations to denote aspiration and nasalization.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia<\/a>, Ancient Scripts<\/a>, Omniglot<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the early part of the 20th century, archeologist Aurel Stein discovered manuscripts in northwestern China in a script that had been lost for centuries, in a language that which completely stunned the linguistic community. The first surprise was that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abugida","category-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}