Editing Tocharian languages (section)

==Tocharian A and B==
[[File:Tocharian languages.svg|thumb|upright=1.5|Tocharian languages A (blue), B (red) and C (green) in the Tarim Basin.{{sfnp|Mallory|Mair|2000|p=274}} Tarim oasis towns are given as listed in the ''[[Book of Han]]'' ({{circa}} 2nd century BC), with the areas of the squares proportional to population.{{sfnp|Mallory|Mair|2000|pp=67, 68}}]]
Tocharian A and B are significantly different, to the point of being [[mutual intelligibility|mutually unintelligible]]. A common Proto-Tocharian language must precede the attested languages by several centuries, probably dating to the late 1st millennium BC.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Kim |first=Ronald |title=Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics |title-link=Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics |publisher=Elsevier |year=2006 |isbn=978-0-08-044299-0 |editor-last=Brown |editor-first=Keith |edition=2nd |chapter=Tocharian}}</ref>

Tocharian A is found only in the eastern part of the Tocharian-speaking area, and all extant texts are of a religious nature. Tocharian B, however, is found throughout the range and in both religious and secular texts. As a result, it has been suggested that Tocharian A was a [[liturgical language]], no longer spoken natively, while Tocharian B was the spoken language of the entire area.<ref name="mallory-expedition" />

The hypothesized relationship of Tocharian A and B as liturgical and spoken forms, respectively, is sometimes compared with the relationship between Latin and the modern [[Romance languages]], or [[Classical Chinese]] and [[Standard Mandarin|Mandarin]]. However, in both of these latter cases, the liturgical language is the linguistic ancestor of the spoken language, whereas no such relationship holds between Tocharian A and B. In fact, from a phonological perspective Tocharian B is significantly more conservative than Tocharian A, and serves as the primary source for reconstructing Proto-Tocharian. Only Tocharian B preserves the following Proto-Tocharian features: stress distinctions, final vowels, diphthongs, and ''o'' vs. ''e'' distinction. In turn, the loss of final vowels in Tocharian A has led to the loss of certain Proto-Tocharian categories still found in Tocharian B, e.g. the vocative case and some of the noun, verb, and adjective declensional classes.

In their declensional and conjugational endings, the two languages innovated in divergent ways, with neither clearly simpler than the other. For example, both languages show significant innovations in the present active indicative endings but in radically different ways, so that only the second-person singular ending is directly cognate between the two languages, and in most cases neither variant is directly cognate with the corresponding [[Proto-Indo-European]] (PIE) form. The agglutinative secondary case endings in the two languages likewise stem from different sources, showing parallel development of the secondary case system after the Proto-Tocharian period. Likewise, some of the verb classes show independent origins, e.g. the class II preterite, which uses reduplication in Tocharian A (possibly from the reduplicated [[aorist]]) but long PIE ''ē'' in Tocharian B (possibly related to the long-vowel perfect found in Latin ''lēgī'', ''fēcī'', etc.).<ref name="Tocharian Online" />

Tocharian B shows an internal chronological development; three linguistic stages have been detected.{{sfnp|Peyrot|2008}} The oldest stage is attested only in Kucha. There are also the middle ("classical") and the late stage.<ref>{{ cite encyclopedia| author=Michaël Peyrot |date=2015| entry = Tocharian Language | entry-url=http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/tocharian-language | title= Encyclopædia Iranica}}</ref>