Watañi lāntaṃ : Khotanese and Tumshuqese Loanwords in Tocharian

Abstract

Contacts between Tocharian A and B and Khotanese and Tumshuqese, four languages once spoken in today’s Xīnjiāng Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China, lack a comprehensive treatment and are still a controversial topic. This work contains the first systematic investigation of the matter from a linguistic point of view. Through a detailed analysis of the lexical material, the author is able to argue that the influence of Khotanese and Tumshuqese on Tocharian was much more extensive than previously thought and it spanned over almost two millennia, from the early Iron Age until the extinction of the four languages at the end of the first millennium CE.