EAST TOCHARIAN Meaning and
Definition
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East Tocharian is a term used to refer to a group of extinct Indo-European languages that were once spoken in the Tarim Basin region in present-day Xinjiang, China. It belongs to the greater Tocharian language family, which is a branch of the Indo-European language family. The speakers of East Tocharian were believed to have migrated to the region from the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent around the 2nd century CE.
The East Tocharian languages are primarily known from a corpus of written texts discovered in the early 20th century in various oasis settlements along the Silk Road. These documents include Buddhist and Manichaean religious texts, secular literature, legal codes, and administrative writings. They were recorded using an adapted version of the Brahmi script, known as the Tocharian script, which was likely derived from the contemporaneous Gupta script of northwestern India.
Linguistically, East Tocharian shows several peculiarities that distinguish it from its Western Tocharian counterpart. It features a complex vowel system with numerous phonological and morphological distinctions, such as vowel length and quality. Furthermore, it exhibits a range of grammatical features, including an extensive case system and verb conjugation patterns.
Due to its unique geographic and historical position as an Indo-European language spoken in what is now China, East Tocharian is of great interest to linguists and scholars studying the spread and development of the Indo-European languages across Eurasia. However, as there are no living speakers or direct descendants of East Tocharian, its precise reconstruction and classification within the Tocharian language group remain subjects of ongoing research and study.
Common Misspellings for EAST TOCHARIAN
- wast tocharian
- sast tocharian
- dast tocharian
- rast tocharian
- 4ast tocharian
- 3ast tocharian
- ezst tocharian
- esst tocharian
- ewst tocharian
- eqst tocharian
- eaat tocharian
- eazt tocharian
- eaxt tocharian
- eadt tocharian
- eaet tocharian
- eawt tocharian
- easr tocharian
- easf tocharian
- easg tocharian
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