Das tocharische Verbalsystem

This thesis is the first and, at present time, only exhaustive treatment of the verbal forms of Tocharian and also the first complete contrastive study of the Tocharian verbal system and its Proto-Indo-European basis. The book presents both a synchronic and diachronic study of the verbal system of the two extinct languages Tocharian A (also = East Tocharian) and Tocharian B (also = West Tocharian), both of which constitute the Tocharian branch of Indo-European. The study is primarily a morphological one, problems of syntax are only treated occasionally. Basis of the study is a collection of all attested TA und TB verbal forms. In the second part all of these verbal forms are listed under the respective verbal root in alphabetical order together with etymological information and in many cases with a discussion of the semantics. This collection is, however, not meant to merely present all attestations, but it is aiming at presenting the stem formations and paradigms of every root. In addition, problematic forms are discussed from a philological point of view. Basis of the collection of verbal forms are all original Tocharian manuscripts that are accessible in the manuscript collections kept in western European museums. The Berlin, London, and Paris collections have been incorporated in entirety, and these constitute about 95% of all known manuscripts. Accordingly, all verbal forms incorporated and listed in this study have been subjected to careful philological probing. By doing so, the material that could have been incorporated is much more extensive than in any study about the Tocharian verb before. In addition, it was possible, on the one hand, to recognize ghost forms, and on the other hand, some forms whose existence has been doubted because they were listed in the handbooks without text reference could be shown to exist indeed. Next to the original manuscripts literature yet unknown to the scholarly community has been used, the most important of which being the personal and annotated copy of the Tocharian A texts that was owned by Wilhelm Siegling, one of the pioneers of the field. The study is further one of the first that takes consequently into account the dialectal classification of Tocharian B and its internal chronology, whose importance was discovered just recently. In the first part of the thesis, all verbal stem classes and verbal categories and all nominal categories that are of some importance for the verb are treated systematically. In general, classification and terminology follows the traditional one established by the Sieg/Siegling School and Krause/Thomas School. Only in some and specially justified cases new classifications and terminology deviating from the ones other wise in use have been proposed, if the old nomenclature respectively classification could be shown to be wrong or at least misleading. At the beginning of every chapter in part I there is a synchronic description of the respective class/category, a systematic illustration of the attested forms and paradigms alongside a discussion of relevant questions with respect to synchrony such as accent patters or ablaut behavior. At first both languages are treated separately and then in contrast to each other, and from this contrastive analysis conclusions for Proto-Tocharian are drawn. Only subsequent to this treatment, possible diachronic scenarios for the development of the category or class from Proto- Indo-European are discussed. In this diachronic part, the general approach is to keep a neutral point of view with respect to the in parts strongly diverging views about the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system. No "school" of the PIE verbal system is a priori given preference. Conclusions about the diachronic development of the Tocharian verbal system are drawn on the evidence of the Tocharian material itself. By doing so, many new insights about the synchronic and diachronic system of the Tocharian verb could be drawn, among them especially to be pointed out are the preterit Class I, whose classification could be refined into 7 ablaut classes, the synchronic behavior of the nasal presents, subjunctive Classes I and V, present Classes III and IV, and in particular the valency behavior of Tocharian verbs, which presents interesting material for questions of general linguistics as well.