Names
A colophon to a Buddhist manuscript in Old Turkish states that it was translated from Sanskrit via a language called twγry, read as toxrï by Friedrich W. K. Müller in 1907 who guessed it was the newly discovered language of the Turpan area. He further connected this toxrï with the ethnonym Tócharoi (Ancient Greek: Τόχαροι, Ptolemy VI, 11, 6, 2nd cent. AD), itself taken from Indo-Iranian (cf. Old Persian tuxāri-, Khotanese ttahvāra, and Sanskrit tukhāra), and proposed the name "Tocharian" (German Tocharisch). Ptolemy's Tócharoi are often associated by modern scholars with the Yuezhi of Chinese historical accounts, who founded the Kushan empire. It is now clear that these people actually spoke Bactrian, an Eastern Iranian language, rather than the Tocharian language. Nevertheless "Tocharian" remains the standard term for the language of the Tarim Basin manuscripts.
The term toxrï appears to be the Old Turkic name for the Tocharians, but is not found in Tocharian texts. The apparent self-designation ārśi appears in Tocharian A texts. Tocharian B texts use the adjective kuśiññe, derived from kuśi or kuči, a name also known from Chinese and Turkic documents. The historian Bernard Sergent has called the group Arśi-Kuči, recently revised to Agni-Kuči.
Read more about this topic: Tocharian Languages
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