Some observations on the linguistic situation in the Tarim Basin oasis towns during the first millennium of the Common Era

Abstract

During the first millennium of the Common Era, Indo-Aryan (Niya Prakrit), Iranian (Khotan Saka) and Tokharian (Kentum Indo-European) languages were spoken in the oasis towns at the edge of the Tarim Basin. Many of the speakers of those languages were Buddhists and many written documents in these languages address Buddhist topics. The aim of the article is twofold. First: to show that the representatives of the three language families (Niya, Sakian,Tokharian) displayed tendencies towards a linguistic area. This concerns mainly certain phonetic trends but also some shared vocabulary and perhaps the morphological feature of an l-past grammeme shared by Tocharian and several Indo-Aryan languages. Second: to show that some of those phonetic trends must originate in dialects of Old Indo-Aryan that were different from Vedic Sanskrit. The second topic is closely related with the theory of a distinction between Outer and Inner Languages in Indo-Aryan. Niya Prakrit, closely related Gāndhārī and the modern Dardic and Nuristani languages are all part of the Outer Languages as against Inner Languages like Vedic Sanskrit or Hindi. It seems that for some time texts in Gāndhārī language were brought to China, where they weretranslated into Chinese before the same happened with Buddhist texts in Sanskrit. Niya Prakrit, on the other hand, was particularly a language of administration and perhaps nobody’s mother tongue. However, its use as a lingua franca must have facilitated the flow of Buddhist literature from India to China.