Filling out the genealogy

Hittite was one of several languages now known only from documents found in Turkey, constituting a whole extinct Indo-European family called Anatolian. Another extinct family was discovered in the 20^th century.

A. At the end of the 1800s, Buddhist manuscripts were discovered in western China, dating as far back as 600 A.D., in an unknown language. Luckily, the script was related to the one now used for Hindi, and the manuscripts were well-known Buddhist texts. The language turned out to be an Indo-European one—it had words like noktim for night—but its name and speakers were a mystery.

B. But one of the documents was written instead in the Uighur language, related to Turkish, and said that it was translated from a language called “twghry.” As it happens, Greek historians mention a people who migrated from the Fergana Valley (at the intersection of what is today Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan) to northern India and converted to Buddhism. The Greeks call them the Tokharoi—note the match to “twghry” in the consonants.

C. Various clues allowed a match between the people the Greeks mentioned and the manuscripts. Frescoes painted by Buddhists in western China around 900 A.D. depict Caucasian people. Mummies have been found in the area with ample facial hair, light eyes, and high, bridged noses; these mummies are also very tall. Further, contemporary Chinese accounts mention white people in the area.

D. Thus, Tocharian was a lost branch of Indo-European, spoken by white peoples who migrated into China.