Tokharian (Linguistics)

[Boreades]

On the ME site, Penny has just reminded me about the tall mummified Caucasians with blond and red hair, wearing tartans, who lived in China 4,000 years ago.

According to Elizabeth Wayland Barber, the Urumchi were wearing plaid tweed clothes. These are astonishingly similar to the plaid tweed twill cloths found in the salt mines of Hallstatt.(Now what is she doing with a famous megalithic trail spot for a middle name? But I digress).

She also says it is likely the language they spoke was Tokharian, an old Indo-European language, but from the same part of the tree of IE languages as Ancient Celtic..

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians

[Mick Harper]

Tokharian! Sigh. Why is it, with ten thousand languages to play with, linguists always insist on inventing new ones?

[Boreades]

Here's another example of a language being invented and then killed off

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartessian_language

Tartessian is (we are told) one of the earliest Celtic languages that had writing as well, c.700BC

By the time the Romans got there and trampled them underfoot they had become the Turdetani

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turdetani

Strabo is said to have said that "The Turdetanians ... and particularly those that live about the Baetis, have completely changed over to the Roman mode of life, not even remembering their own language any more."

At which point I expect that the northern Celts were so disgusted with their soft southern cousins that they abbreviated their name to Turds. As such, a reference to something unpleasant that had been trodden-in, and one that has lasted over two thousand years?