Tocharian A

Tocharian A, also known as Tokharian A, Eastern Tocharian, Agnean (tkaṃ), Karashahrian or Turfanian is a dead language that was in use in the 1st millennium AD in the Karashahr and Turfan region of the Tarim Basin, present-day Xinjiang, Western China. First discovered from Buddhist texts dating back to around the 7th century AD, it coexisted with a related language, Tocharian B that together possibly with Tocharian C form the Tocharian branch of the Indo-European languages. This language was notably used in what China's Han dynasty then called the Kiu-che Kingdom (known as the Kushan Empire). It is believed that Tocharian A died out with the other Tocharian languages when the Uyghurs and the Yenisei Kyrgyz moved into the Tarim Basin.

Tocharian A is known from around the 2000 manuscripts found. From these series of texts which are majority Buddhist liturgical texts are transcribed in a script derived from Brahmi. Unlike Tocharian B, there are no secular texts in Tocharian A. One possible explanation is that at the time these texts were written, Tocharian A survived only as a liturgical language and Tocharian B would still have been a living language.

Another hypothesis, however, is that this absence is simply explained by the very fragmentary attestation of Tocharian languages in general.

From the work of Georges-Jean Pinault and Melanie Malzahn in 2007, it is now recognized that it was also a living, spoken language.

The Tocharian A word for horse (yuk) is declined as follows:

One of the innovations of Tocharian A is the presence of a sibilant consonant ṣ.

The following are some examples of Tocharian A words with English words:

The following is also a comparison of some numbers in Tocharian A and other Indo-European languages: