Tocharian And Old Chinese

The aim of this thesis is to apply the phonological approach to the comparison of Tocharian and Old Chinese and identify specific body of cognates based on phonological criteria in an effort to establish the genetic relationship between the two languages. The first section gives a introduction to the discovery and denomination of Tocharian languages and the history and migration of Tocharian people. In the second section, I present a detailed description of phonological inventories of both Tocharian and Old Chinese and established correspondences between their possible initial consonants and consonant clusters. Although the Tocharian languages have a more enriched system of initial consonant clusters, there is a considerable inventory of shared initial consonant clusters which bear a strong resemblance to that of Chinese, namely, the ones starting with *s-, the ones with medials *-r- and *-l- and the ones starting with nasals. Not only is the structure of the syllables similar, but also is the distribution of the consonant clusters. In the third section, it is observed that the two languages share a number of cognates and there exists numerous phonological correspondences in basic vocabulary. The sound correspondence includes that of labials, dentals, affricate, velars, palatalized sounds, semivowel and liquid and retroflex. Based on the data available and the results achieved, it is my conclusion that there is a genetic relationship holding between Tocharian and Chinese languages and they originate from a common proto language in prehistoric times.