2019/09/25 by Michaël Peyrot · 3 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Linguistics and language evolution #Ancient Near East History #Linguistics and Cultural Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1163/9789004409354_014
openalex publication_date 2019/09/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
In this article, the value of Tocharian evidence for the Indo-Anatolian and Indo-Uralic hypotheses is discussed on the basis of three cases studies. It is argued that evidence for Indo-Anatolian needs to be checked specifically against the next node down in the phylogenetic tree of Indo-European, probably “Indo-Tocharian”. Further, the Anatolian and Tocharian verbs for ‘drink’, Hitt. eku-zi and Toch.B yok-, cannot at present be connected with Proto-Finno-Ugric *juxi ‘drink’, since Samoyedic evidence points to Proto-Uralic *ji̮xi. Finally, the Anatolian and Tocharian interrogative in *m- next to the well known Indo-European interrogative in *kw- has an exact correspondence in Uralic, but is difficult to use as evidence for the phylogenetic tree of Indo-European.