Tocharian Online: Unearthing the Lost Language of the Silk Road
Tocharian Online from UT Austin's Linguistics Research Center introduces two closely related Indo-European languages, Tocharian A and B, discovered along the Silk Road in Chinese Turkestan. These languages, preserved in Buddhist manuscripts from the 6th-8th centuries, challenge historical linguistics with their eastern location and centum classification. The site offers a full course with lessons, grammar, and glossaries, exploring their unique phonetic and grammatical features, as well as the intriguing story behind their name.
Tocharian thus broke down the geographical interpretation of the centum-satem dialectal division, which held that the centum speakers formed a western dialect group in the original Indo-European community, and the satem speakers, an eastern group.