Historical Grammar of Tocharian

A new historical grammar of Tocharian is a desideratum for several reasons. First, because there is a growing interest of both general and especially historical linguists in the Tocharian branch of Indo-European, which is not matched by any recent reference book that is both comprehensive and reliable. Second, many questions of Tocharian historical grammar are still controversial, some of them being even very basic ones. The main reason for this rather deplorable state of affairs is the fact that so far less than 20% of the total of Tocharian texts are accessible via scholarly editions, which had as its consequence that most of what has been written by linguists about the Tocharian languages so far is merely based on incomplete and too often unreliable information, and may therefore prove incorrect and outdated from a philological point of view. This historical grammar of Tocharian will in contrast be based on all accessible original documents amounting to nearly 97% of the total material, and apart from the simple advantage of having access to a far greater amount of documents, I will also be able to make use of recently gained insights about the linguistic stratification of the Tocharian languages, and the very recent findings about the chronology of Tocharian manuscripts based on paleographic evidence and 14C analyses.