The project aims at producing a comprehensive e-dictionary of Tocharian, including a Dictionary and Thesaurus of Tocharian A and an etymological Dictionary of Common Tocharian. Tocharian is an extinct language, belonging to the Indo-European language family tree. The language was spoken in the region of Eastern Central Asia up to the 11th ct. AD. Tocharian is a difficult language with no living daughter languages, in which dictionary resources traditionally has been a problem. Renewed interest in historical linguistics, using computational cladistics methods, has resulted in a demand for reliable and electronically available dictionary resources for extinct languages such as Tocharian. The project is a continuation of an earlier project, which resulted in the publication of the first volume of a dictionary of Tocharian A. The current project aims at completing this project, as well as make available a reliable etymological dictionary of Common Tocharian (Tocharian A and B), both resources in the form of paper and electronic dictionaries. The project, which is performed by a core team of leading tocharologists, is done in collaboration with an international project, which aims at publishing online all Tocharian texts (6,000). Furthermore, the project is also based on a number of previously unpublished data collections by leading scholars of the older generation, which have been made available to the team of the current project.
Project collaborators are:
Gerd Carling (project leader)
Chundra Cathcart (postdoctoral researcher)
Filip Larsson (research assistant)
Rob Verhoeven (engineer, project assistant)
Georges-Jean Pinault, Michaël Peyrot, Melanie Malzahn, Olav Hackstein, and Fanny Meunier (external collaborators)
The Project is funded for 2014-2016 by the Swedish Research Council (VR)