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Tocharian
is an ancient language
related to Hittite
The relief is Hittite.
Similar symbols are also found in combination in
Pharaonic Egyptian hieroglyphs.
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The Encyclopaedia Britannica writes
that Indo-European languages
"are the descendants of a single unrecorded language,
believed to have been spoken over 5,000 years ago
[it is actually much older than that]
in the steppe regions north of the Black Sea
and to have split into a number of dialects
by about the 3rd millenium BC.
These dialects,
carried by migrating tribes to Europe and Asia,
developed in time into separate languages,
a number of which have left written records of their various stages..."
Included in those written languages are
Anatolian (the Hittite language),
Indo-Iranian (this includes extinct Sanskrit),
Avestan, modern Hindi and Persian,
extinct Tocharian,
and the modern languages of Europe.
Tocharian is divided into
Tocharian A and Tocharian B.
Tocharian B is the older (or is the less mixed) of the two
and has greater similarities with Baltic than does Tocharian A.
V.V. Ivanov wrote in Zeitschrift für Slawistik, Vol. XXIII, 1978
[here in LexiLine translation] that
"the 3rd person singular in Baltic
sets it apart from other languages,
manifesting an archaic state of language
comparable to proto-Tocharian and proto-Anatolian."
In recent years, some of the brighter modern linguists
have taken the correct position that Latvian and Lithuanian
are the most archaic of all Indo-European tongues.
This fits in well with Pitman and Ryan's recent book,
Noah's Flood (published by Simon & Schuster)
and the geologically undeniable inundation of the Black Sea
by the Aegean (through the Bosporus [Latvian Parsperis "split"]
ca. 5500 BC - with subsequent migration of the "Indo-Europeans" -
and their astronomy - out of the Black Sea region.
Prof. Rainer Eckert (Univ. Greifswald) wrote in 1971
in Baltistische Studien that
"a series of researches,
especially in the [then] Soviet Union,
demonstrate how important
the evidence of the Baltic languages is
for a partial reconstruction of Indo-European".
In 1985 Gamkrelidze and Ivanov
challenged the prevailing language tree still used
by most of the mainstream and backward linguists of the world
(and thus by the prevailing erroneous etymolgies of Indo-European),
demonstrating pronunciation changes in the Caucasus,
and the Kartvalian family of languages,
contrary to prevailing´ linguistic rules.
Hence, they reconfigured the language tree.
Everyone laughed until the Americans
Donald Ringe, Ann Taylor and Tandy Warrow
of the University of Pennsylvania in 1995
repeated the work of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov
on a computer analysis of the world's languages
and, at first unbelieving - confirmed their linguistic results.
As Pitman and Ryan write, in Noah's Flood, Simon & Schuster (1999)
"What Gamkrelidze had deduced and what the computer had confirmed
was an initial bifurcation [of Indo-European] into two trunks
- one for southerners, the speakers of Anatolian,
and the other for the northerners,
who then divided into groups migrating [from the Black Sea / Baltic Sea area]
into the interior of Europe,
the speakers of Celtic groups traveling to the Mediterranean coast of Europe,
the speakers of Italic;
and groups adventuring eastward into the heart of central Asia,
speaking the ancestral form of Tocharian
[very similar to Baltic, esp. Tocharian B]."
