Save Tocharian

[tom]

Make a Tocharian language survive until 2012. It is OK if all you get is a couple thousand spakers. Of course, if you can think of a nonASB way of getting 500 million, go for it.

[Iori]

If you mean one of them continugin to exist, it's basically not gonna happen, languages do not stay the same over that long a period of time, especially during the time period this would happen, however if you mean a descendant language that's part of the Tocharian language family, that's more doable.

To keep one suriviving you basically need the ancient Uighur tribes to either not invade the area or for them to be less unified and have them resultingly adopt the languages.

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Originally Posted by Iori

If you mean one of them continugin to exist, it's basically not gonna happen, languages do not stay the same over that long a period of time, especially during the time period this would happen, however if you mean a descendant language that's part of the Tocharian language family, that's more doable.

To keep one suriviving you basically need the ancient Uighur tribes to either not invade the area or for them to be less unified and have them resultingly adopt the languages.

Get a small group of them into the caucasus. All sorts of relict languages survived there.

[RGB]

The Pamirs may work as well, actually (though assimilation into Sogdian may be a problem). And you have until the 9th c. to do it.

[altwere]

Were the Kushans related? If so it might be easier to keep their language alive, they had empire in Afganistan and northern India.
For Tochtarian maybe have it be the trade language on the silk road

[False Dmitri]

Tocharian endured as a liturgical language after it had died out in everyday speech. It escapes me what their religion was (Buddhism, maybe?) but I wonder if they could have somehow converted the Uighurs and preserved the language as part of the religion. If a small community of Tocharian speakers still existed, a strong religious institution that used Tocharian could sustain the language, and maybe later the culture could revive for some reason.

[Simreeve]

Originally Posted by Benkarnell

Tocharian endured as a liturgical language after it had died out in everyday speech. It escapes me what their religion was (Buddhism, maybe?)

Yes, Buddhism.


I don't see any major reason why a few villages of people speaking a 'Tocharian' language couldn't have survived as a minority within a country dominated by some other people, probably in a mountain valley or maybe at one of the more isolated oasises, with only a minor POD: For comparison the 'Sarmatian' language, which is of comparable antiquity, survives today through its Ossetian descendant in the Caucasus and seems to have survived (under the name of 'Jassic', derived from the name of the 'Iazyge' tribe) in one small area within Hungary until at least the Turkish conquest in the 16th century AD as well.