Editing Tocharian languages (section)

==Names==
[[File:Royal family, Cave 17, Kizil (family detail, retouched), Hermitage Museum.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Tocharians|Tocharian]] royal family (King, Queen and young blond-haired Princes), Kizil, Cave 17 (entrance wall, lower left panel). [[Hermitage Museum]].<ref>References BDce-888、889, MIK III 8875, now in the Hermitage Museum.{{Cite web |last=Sheng dao wenhua zazhi |date=2020-01-30 |title=É lì ài ěr mǐ tǎ shén bó wù guǎn cáng kè zī ěr shí kū bì huà |script-title=zh:俄立艾爾米塔什博物館藏克孜爾石窟壁畫 |url=https://www.sohu.com/a/369632883_534369 |website=sohu.com |language=zh}}</ref><ref>Image 16 in {{Cite book |last=Yaldiz |first=Marianne |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MAV83J8cA5MC&pg=PR15 |title=Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte Chinesisch-Zentralasiens (Xinjiang) |date=1987 |publisher=Brill |isbn=978-90-04-07877-2 |page=xv |language=de |trans-title=Archeology and Art History of Sino-Central Asia (Xinjiang)}}</ref><ref name="RG">"The images of donors in Cave 17 are seen in two fragments with numbers MIK 8875 and MIK 8876. One of them with halo may be identified as king of Kucha." in {{Cite book |last=Ghose |first=Rajeshwari |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PBnRFQtP7sYC |title=Kizil on the Silk Road: Crossroads of Commerce & Meeting of Minds |publisher=Marg Publications |year=2008 |isbn=978-81-85026-85-5 |page=127, note 22 |language=en}} "The panel of Tocharian donors and Buddhist monks, which was at the MIK (MIK 8875) disappeared during World War II and was discovered by Yaldiz in 2002 in the Hermitage Museum" page 65, note 30</ref><ref name="AVLC68">{{Cite book |last1=Le Coq |first1=Albert von |url=https://archive.org/details/diebuddhistische00leco_0/page/68/mode/2up |title=Die buddhistische spätantike in Mittelasien, VI |last2=Waldschmidt |first2=Ernst |year=1922 |publisher=Berlin, D. Reimer [etc.] |pages=68–70}}</ref>]]
A [[colophon (publishing)|colophon]] to a [[Silk Road transmission of Buddhism|Central Asian Buddhist]] manuscript from the late 8th century states that it was translated into [[Old Turkic]] from Sanskrit, via a ''twγry'' language. In 1907, Emil Sieg and [[Friedrich W. K. Müller]] proposed that ''twγry'' was a name for the newly-discovered language of the Turpan area.{{sfnp|Mallory|Mair|2000|pp=280–281}}
Sieg and Müller, reading this name as ''toxrï'', connected it with the ethnonym ''[[tokharistan|Tócharoi]]'' ({{Langx|grc|Τόχαροι}}, [[Ptolemy]] VI, 11, 6, 2nd century AD), itself taken from [[Indo-Iranian languages|Indo-Iranian]] (cf. [[Old Persian]] ''tuxāri-'', [[Saka language|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]].{{sfnp|Mallory|Mair|2000|pp=281}}{{sfnp|Beckwith|2009|pp=380–383}} It is now clear that these people actually spoke [[Bactrian language|Bactrian]], an [[Eastern Iranian language]], rather than the language of the Tarim manuscripts, so the term "Tocharian" is considered a misnomer.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Adams |first=Douglas Q. |author-link=Douglas Q. Adams |title=Facts about the World's Languages: An Encyclopedia of the World's Major Languages, Past and Present |publisher=H.W. Wilson |year=2001 |isbn=978-0-8242-0970-4 |page=748 |chapter=Tocharian |quote=Also arguing against equating the Tocharians with the Tocharoi is the fact that the actual language of the Tocharoi, when attested to in the second and third centuries of our era, is indubitably Iranian. |editor1-last=Garry |editor1-first=Jane |editor2-last=Rubino |editor2-first=Carl R. Galvez |editor3-last=Bodomo |editor3-first=Adams B. |editor3-link=Adams Bodomo |editor4-last=Faber |editor4-first=Alice |editor5-last=French |editor5-first=Robert}}</ref><ref>{{harvp|Hansen |2012|p=[https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780195159318/page/72 72]}} "In fact, we know that the Yuezhi used Bactrian, an Iranian language written in Greek characters, as an official language. For this reason, Tocharian is a misnomer; no extant evidence suggests that the residents of the Tocharistan region of Afghanistan spoke the Tocharian language recorded in the documents found in the Kucha region."</ref><ref>{{harvp|Henning|1949|p=161}}: "At the same time we can now finally dispose of the name 'Tokharian'. This misnomer has been supported by three reasons, all of them now discredited."</ref> Nevertheless, it remains the standard term for the language of the Tarim Basin manuscripts.<ref name="Tocharian Online">{{Cite web |last1=Krause |first1=Todd B. |last2=Slocum |first2=Jonathan |title=Tocharian Online: Series Introduction |url=https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/tokol |access-date=17 April 2020 |publisher=University of Texas at Austin}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |title=Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture |title-link=Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture |publisher=Fitzroy Dearborn |year=1997 |isbn=978-1-884964-98-5 |editor-last=Mallory |editor-first=J.P. |location=London |page=[https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaindo00mall/page/n537 509] |editor-last2=Adams |editor-first2=Douglas Q.}}</ref>

In 1938, [[Walter Bruno Henning]] found the term "four ''twγry''" used in early 9th-century manuscripts in Sogdian, Middle Iranian, and Uighur. He argued that it referred to the region on the northeast edge of the Tarim, including Agni and [[Karakhoja]], but not Kucha. He thus inferred that the colophon referred to the Agnean language.{{sfnp|Henning|1938|pp=559–561}}{{sfnp|Hansen|2012|pp=71–72}}

Although the term ''twγry'' or ''toxrï'' appears to be the Old Turkic name for the Tocharians, it is not found in Tocharian texts.<ref name="Tocharian Online" />
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.<ref name="Tocharian Online" /> The historian [[Bernard Sergent]] compounded these names to coin an alternative term ''Arśi-Kuči'' for the family, recently revised to ''Agni-Kuči'',<ref>{{Cite book |last=Sergent |first=Bernard |title=Les Indo-Européens: Histoire, langues, mythes |publisher=Payot |year=2005 |edition=2nd |pages=113–117 |author-link=Bernard Sergent |orig-year=1995}}</ref> but this name has not achieved widespread usage.