Like Dust on the Silk Road

Chams Benoît Bernard, Ph.D. (2023), is an independent scholar, a linguist and an Arabic and Persian interpreter. He works on literature, poetry, and has a particular interest in the history of languages, and etymology. He has published articles and works on various topics, such as Middle and New Persian, Tocharian etymology, Judeo-Persian, Indo-European and Semitic languages as well as religious studies.

• Acknowledgments1 Introduction1.1 Tocharian and Iranian1.2 State of the art1.3 Research issues1.4 Methodology1.5 Structure1.6 Spelling of Tocharian stress1.7 Alphabetic order2 Old Steppe Iranian Loanwords in Tocharian2.1 Introduction2.2 Old Steppe Iranian borrowings: plausible cases2.3 Old Steppe Iranian borrowings: possible cases2.4 Old Steppe Iranian borrowings: difficult cases2.5 Old Steppe Iranian borrowings: rejected cases2.6 Old Steppe Iranian calques in Tocharian2.7 Discussion of the features of Old Steppe Iranian3 BMAC Words in Tocharian (a Selective Survey)3.1 Introduction3.2 Analysis of potential BMAC loanwords in Tocharian3.3 Other possible BMAC loanwords in Tocharian3.4 Discussion4 Conclusion4.1 Results4.2 The Tocharian wayAppendix 1: The Tocharian Word for ‘Parrot’ and Its OriginAppendix 2: On the Etymology of Tocharian B patstsāṅk and Tocharian A pātsaṅk ‘Window’BibliographyIndex