Talk:Tocharian languages

Horrible layout

Viewed in Safari iOS on a large-screen iPad in landscape mode, the layout is horrible as the diagram showing the map geographic ranges of the languages is inserted immediately after the first word "The" in its paragraph, then follows "discovery of Tocharian". Can anyone fix the CSS to not be insane?CecilWard (talk) 14:20, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Spelling

The German-based spelling "Tocharian" follows the history of research and is generally used by linguists; it is pronounced /tɔˈxɑːriən/ with the fricative as in the Scottish hydronym "Loch"; to achieve the same pronunciation, French linguists write "Tokharian" (here with English ending), pronounced /təˈkɑːriən/, the /kh/ standing for the same fricative. 2A02:8108:9640:AC3:B9BD:D638:E4AE:C822 (talk) 15:30, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Move request in progress

A move request relevant to this page is in progress at Talk:Agnean language#Requested move 12 May 2025. Kanguole 14:47, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

Relationships within IE (sensu lato) revisited

@HJJHolm: I think that the alternative idea that the Tocharian languages would be closer related to the Anatolian ones (and vice versa) than to other Indoeuropean ones is interesting enough to be mentioned, even if it were only supported by your own investigation (which indeed is documented in a RS). However, I see that you here also gave two other sources. Of these, I've only been able to look at the one in Science 337 (by Bouckaert et al.). I found no direct mention of Tocharian in the text proper; but it appeared in a cladistic tree diagram (figure 2), which the authors seemed to regard as a result of their study. However, in that diagram, Tocharian was closest related to Armenian; and the Tocharian-Armenian clade was depicted as closer to a group comprising all other investigated language groups except Anatolian than to the latter group. I therefore respectfully wonder if you could check that article again, and either explain better how it supports a Tocharian-Anatolian subdivision, or change it to one proposing a Tocharian-Armenian one, or retract it from the list of references, whatever you find is most relevant. (I have not tried to look at the technical appendixes to the article; I believe that you have much better abilities than I have to follow these. However, if you found the Tocharian-Anatolian subdivision model being presented in one of these, then I think this should be explained in our reference.)

I am not here concerned with any questions about the correctness of the one or the other grouping; just with the correct presentation of what these reliable sources actually say. If Bouckaert et al. do present an Armenian-Tocharian hypothesis, then I think it should be mentioned, even if their 'cladogram' has several surprising features, and even if it should be based on a dubious lixture of glottochronological and physical distance metrics (and ignoring other aspects than vocabulary, such as grammar and phonetics). (I do not claim that their study is so ill based; as I noted, I have not even looked at their technical appendixes, and the less tried to evaluate their methods. I just say that even in the worst case, and whether they support yours or not, their conclusion would be worth mentioning.)

I also ping @Mahagaja and Florian Blaschke, since you participated in the old discussion. JoergenB (talk) 21:27, 24 August 2025 (UTC)