Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-7pwfn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-15T04:49:04.253Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Tibetan Influences on Tocharian, I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

E. Sapir
E. Sapir*
Affiliation:
Yale University
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

As far back as 1922, in an article which in many respects remains the most significant contribution yet made to the larger understanding of the status of Tocharian, Eduard Hermann pointed out the importance of Tibetan because of its far-reaching morphological influence on Tocharian. Little attention, however, seems to have been paid to this aspect of the Tocharian problem, yet it is safe to say that one can not take a step in interpreting the forms of Tocharian, syntax and morphology both, unless one bears in mind the moulding influence exerted on Tocharian, both A and B, by this non-Indo-European language. In brief, Tocharian is a Tibetanized Indo-European idiom. Once this is understood, the much discussed problem of whether both A and B were spoken in Chinese Turkestan or B (‘Kuchean‘) alone, the A manuscripts appearing in the eastern part of the area merely because they were brought there by speakers of B from a real or supposed western home in Tokharestan (Bactria), falls by the wayside as an utterly pointless question. If dialect A has specifically Tibetan features in its structure—and it has—how could these have developed except through actual contact between speakers of Tocharian A and speakers of Tibetan, and where could such contact be had except in Chinese Turkestan itself, at a point not far removed from linguistically Tibetan territory?

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 12 , Issue 4-Part1: October-December , December 1936, pp. 259 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © 1936 Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 A review of Sieg und Siegling, Tocharische Sprachreste, I. Band. Die Texte (KZ 50. 296–314 [1922]; see 309–11).

2 Referred to as SSS, i.e., E. Sieg, W. Siegling, and W. Schulze.

3 Inasmuch as c represents a palatal affricative, roughly tś, the two forms āriñci and āriñcṣi are likely to be merely orthographic variants of a single form in -ṣi, the most common Tocharian adjectival suffix. If this is correct, āriñci (occurring only as an oblique sing., āriñciṃ) would not be formally parallel to such adjectives in palatalizing -i as ñäkci: ñkät ‘god’ and mañi: mañ ‘moon, month’, as is assumed by SSS.

4 See Jäschke, A Tibetan-English Dictionary, s.v. t'ugs (233).

5 For ‘ respectful’ terms in Tibetan see Jäschke, Tibetan Grammar, Addenda by A. H. Francke assisted by W. Simon 35–6, 131–6 (1929).

6 SSS §44a; Tocharische Sprachreste 58b 2.

7 Jäschke, A Tibetan-English Dictionary 233.

8 Tocharische Sprachreste 6 b 2.

9 SSS §388 b. The occurrences in Tocharische Sprachreste are: 426 b 2 (käryā lot(klu)ne, apparently translating Sanskrit k[aruṇa]yā); 399 a 5 (tām kuleyaṃ käryā lotklune 'pity for that woman'); 399 b 1 (wākmats käryā l..ku-, broken off, apparently 'a special compassion', with l(ot)ku(ne) miswritten for lotklune?); and 465 a 2 (käryā lot[klu]-, broken off).

10 SSS 467.

11 SSS §363 c.

12 SSS §208. -āṣ is here referred to as ‘die vollere Endung’, while käryā above is interpreted as the ā-case of kri (§200 b) petrified into an adverb (§388 b).

13 SSS §37.

14 Jäschke, A Tibetan-English Dictionary 442.

15 E.g., under the category ‘ heart’ comes ‘ thought’: āriñc pältsäk‘ heart thought’; under the category ‘pain’ come ‘sorrow’ and ‘doubt’: klop śurām ‘pain sorrow’, klop sañee ‘pain doubt’; under the category ‘love’ come ‘belovedness’, ‘homage’, ‘worship’, ‘friendliness’: tuṅk kāpñune ‘love belovedness’, tuṅk poto ‘love homage’, tuṅk ynāñmune ‘love worship’, tuṅk ylārone ‘love friendliness’. Examples of this sort are not recognized by SSS as involving notions of classification but are interpreted, reasonably enough, as illustrating dvandva-like compounding, frequently with synonymous meaning of members, e.g. ‘love (and) homage’, cf. śla tuṅk poto yo ‘together with [= one provided with] love and homage’. See SSS §358. They point out, however (§359), that such compounds are often treated as singulars, e.g., klop sañce wikāluneyaṃ kälkāṃ ‘pain doubt in-disappearance went (sing.)-for-her’, which they translate as ‘Schmerz (und) Zweifel verging [= vergingen] ihr’ but which, on the analogy of such Tibetan forms as sñiṅ-brtse-ba, one is tempted to understand rather as ‘(that) pain (which is) doubt disappeared from her’. Naturally, there can be no sharp line of division between the ‘classifying’ compound and the synonym compound.

16 Jäschke, A Tibetan-English Dictionary 180.

17 The treatment of IE d in Tocharian is a problem which I hope to consider at another time.

18 Jäschke, A Tibetan-English Dictionary 198.

19 SSS §237.

20 SSS §363a.

21 SSS 475–6.

22 Somewhat comparable would seem to be such untypical Sanskrit examples as putra-hata- ‘whose son is killed’, a-danta-jāta- ‘whose teeth have not come to be’ (Wackernagel, Altindische Grammatik 2.1.302), except that in these the second element is a verbal derivative (participle) instead of the underlying verb stem.

23 SSS §123.

24 A Tibetan-English Dictionary 80.

24a klāṅklye (TS 264a2) is a nom. m. pl. of the verbal adjective *klāṅkäl, from a verb klāṅk-. Inasmuch as the form is preceded by yukañ oṅkälmāñ w. [read wu?] 'horses (and) elephants two [?]', it seems reasonable to connect the word with klaṅk. The passage may therefore read: 'Horses (and) elephants, two (sorts) to be used for riding'. In that case klāṅk- would either be a denominative verb based on klaṅk or, far less likely, klaṅk a noun derivative (with IE o-vocalism) based on the verb.

25 Jäschke, A Tibetan-English Dictionary XVIII, sub glog.

26 SSS 424. For absolutives see SSS §421 d.

27 SSS §8.

28 SSS §68 and p. 466.

29 SSS §68 and p. 469.

30 Original -e- of reduplicating syllables becomes palatalizing -a- in A and B. Palatalized w, say wv or w, reverts to w in A but becomes y in B; another example is A want ‘wind’: B yente.

31 SSS §8.

32 Alternatively, the direct attachment of verbal abstracts in -r to the reflex of the IE perfect participle (or other prototype of Toch. -u, -o).

33 Corrected by SSS from tāpap.

34 See E. Sieg, ‘Die Geschichte von den Löwenmachern in tocharischer Version’ (in Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Sprachgeschichte vornehmlich des Orients Ernst Kuhn gewidmet 149, 151 [1916]). I have very slightly rearranged Sieg's translations so as to let the German version reflect the Tocharian original as literally as possible.

35 T(ocharische) S(prachreste) 9 a 2; SSS 271.

36 TS 254 b 7; SSS 198. Better, presumably, ‘gegangen sind’.

37 E. Sieg und W. Siegling, ‘Die Speisung des Bodhisattva vor der Erleuchtung’ (Asia Major 2. 280, 283 [1935]).

38 S. Lévi, Fragments de Textes Koutchéens 73–4 (1933). Better, presumably, ‘il prit en dégout’; cf. A mroskat (pret. med., 3d pers. sing., of mrosk- ‘[der Welt] überdrüssig werden‘), SSS 457.

39 Properly speaking, the Tibetan verb has no inherent implication of person. All transitives, moreover, are best understood as inherently passive. It has never been made clear, so far as I can see, when the Tibetan verb is tenseless and when it has a set of tense-mode forms (present, perfect, future, imperative); thus, mgu-ba ‘to rejoice’ and bgrod-pa ‘to walk’ are used in all tenses and modes, whereas sdod-pa ‘to sit’ has a specific perfect-future form bsdad and god-pa ‘to design’ (‘present’ or infinitive) has a perfect (bgod), a future (dgod), and an imperative (k'od).

40 Jäschke, A Tibetan-English Dictionary 23.

41 Ibid.

42 Op. cit. 27.

43 Jäschke, Tibetan Grammar 157.

44 Op. cit. 57.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 Op. cit. 155–8; see also 54–64.