Theme: Ethnoculture

(FB 1552160830 Timestamp) Tocharian (Exterminated by Chinese Expansion) The Tocharians or Tokharians (/təˈkɛəriənz/ or /təˈkɑːriənz/) were Indo-European peoples who inhabited the medieval oasis city-states on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin (modern Xinjiang, China) in ancient times. The Tocharian languages, a branch of the Indo-European family, are known from manuscripts from the 6th to 8th centuries AD. The name “Tocharian” was given to them by modern scholars, who identified their speakers with a people who inhabited Bactria from the 2nd century BC, and were known in ancient Greek sources as the Tókharoi (Latin Tochari). This identification is generally considered erroneous, but the name “Tocharian” remains the most common term for the languages and their speakers. Agricultural communities first appeared in the oases of the northern Tarim circa 2000 BC. (The earliest Tarim mummies, which may not be connected to the Tocharians, date from c. 1800 BC.) Some scholars have linked these communities to the Afanasievo culture found earlier (c. 3500–2500 BC) in Siberia, north of the Tarim or Central Asian BMAC culture. By the 2nd century BC, these settlements had developed into city states, overshadowed by nomadic peoples to the north and Chinese empires to the east. These cities, the largest of which was Kucha, also served as way stations on the branch of the Silk Road that ran along the northern edge of the Taklamakan desert. From the 8th century AD, the Uyghurs – speakers of a Turkic language from the Kingdom of Qocho – settled in the region. The peoples of the Tarim city states intermixed with the Uyghurs, whose Old Uyghur language spread through the region. The Tocharian languages are believed to have become extinct during the 9th century. Tocharian also spelled Tokharian (/təˈkɛəriən/ or /təˈkɑːriən/), is an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family. It is known from manuscripts dating from the 6th to the 8th century AD, which were found in oasis cities on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin (now part of Xinjiang in northwest China). The discovery of these languages in the early 20th century contradicted the formerly prevalent idea of an east–west division of the Indo-European language family on the centum–satem isogloss, and prompted reinvigorated study of the family. Identifying the authors with the Tokharoi people of ancient Bactria (Tokharistan), early authors called these languages “Tocharian”. Although this identification is now generally considered mistaken, the name has remained. The documents record two closely related languages, called Tocharian A (“East Tocharian”, Agnean or Turfanian) and Tocharian B (“West Tocharian” or Kuchean). The subject matter of the texts suggests that Tocharian A was more archaic and used as a Buddhist liturgical language, while Tocharian B was more actively spoken in the entire area from Turfan in the east to Tumshuq in the west. A body of loanwords and names found in Prakrit documents have been dubbed Tocharian C (Kroränian).

(FB 1552160069 Timestamp) Iranic The Iranian or Iranic languages[2][3] are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples. The Iranian languages are grouped in three stages: Old Iranian (until 400 BC), Middle Iranian (400 BC – 900 AD), and New Iranian (since 900 AD). The two directly attested Old Iranian languages are Old Persian (from the Achaemenid Empire) and Old Avestan (the language of the Avesta). Of the Middle Iranian languages, the better understood and recorded ones are Middle Persian (from the Sasanian Empire), Parthian (from the Parthian Empire), and Bactrian (from the Kushan and Hephthalite empires). As of 2008, there were an estimated 150–200 million native speakers of the Iranian languages.[4] Ethnologue estimates that there are 86 Iranian languages,[5][6] the largest among them being Persian, Pashto, and the Kurdish dialect continuum.[7] The term Iranian is applied to any language which descends from the ancestral Proto-Iranian language.[8] This use of the term for the Iranian language family was introduced in 1836 by Christian Lassen.[9] Robert Needham Cust used the term Irano-Aryan in 1878,[10] and Orientalists such as George Abraham Grierson and Max Müller contrasted Irano-Aryan (Iranian) and Indo-Aryan (Indic). Some recent scholarship, primarily in German, has revived this convention.[11][12][13][14] The Iranian languages are divided into the following branches: The Western Iranian languages subdivided into: Southwestern, of which Persian is the dominant member; Northwestern, of which the Kurdish languages are the dominant members. The Eastern Iranian languages subdivided into: Southeastern, of which Pashto is the dominant member; Northeastern, by far the smallest branch, of which Ossetian is the dominant member. Proto-Iranian Historical distribution in 100 BC: shown are Sarmatia, Scythia, Bactria (Eastern Iranian, in orange); and the Parthian Empire (Western Iranian, in red) The Iranian languages all descend from a common ancestor: the so-called Proto-Iranian which itself evolved from Proto-Indo-Iranian. This ancestor language is speculated to have origins in Central Asia, and the Andronovo Culture is suggested as a candidate for the common Indo-Iranian culture around 2000 BC. It was situated precisely in the western part of Central Asia that borders present-day Russia (and present-day Kazakhstan). It was in relative proximity to the other satem ethno-linguistic groups of the Indo-European family, like Thracian, Balto-Slavic and others, and to common Indo-European’s original homeland (more precisely, the steppes of southern Russia to the north of the Caucasus), according to the reconstructed linguistic relationships of common Indo-European. Proto-Iranian thus dates to some time after Proto-Indo-Iranian break-up, or the early second millennium BCE, as the Old Iranian languages began to break off and evolve separately as the various Iranian tribes migrated and settled in vast areas of southeastern Europe, the Iranian plateau, and Central Asia. Proto-Iranian innovations compared to Proto-Indo-Iranian include:[15] the turning of sibilant fricative *s into non-sibilant fricative glottal *h; the voiced aspirated plosives *bÊ°, *dÊ°, *gÊ° yielding to the voiced unaspirated plosives *b, *d, *g resp.; the voiceless unaspirated stops *p, *t, *k before another consonant changing into fricatives *f, *θ, *x resp.; voiceless aspirated stops *pÊ°, *tÊ°, *kÊ° turning into fricatives *f, *θ, *x, resp.