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Fun to read this in light of this other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49279627
Wait wait wait: so Xinjiang is an inalienable part of Europe?
For those interested in an overview of the history of the area in an historic dramatic frame of reference I can recommend the group of short stories published as Life Along the Silk Road by Susan Whitfield.
> Wait wait wait: so Xinjiang is an inalienable part of Europe
Only in the sense that Europe is an inalienable part of India.
Indo-European Union
→ Macro African Union → Metazoan Member States → Panspermian Massive → Anomalies Anonymous
"Hi I'm infinity and I... I cracked and generated a self-replicating biology last aeon. By the second kalpa they'd devised a writing system and started battling each other for spacetime. I've got to stop doing that."
"Hey, your uh...Life...it's killing an awful lot, isn't it?"
"Yeah, well, more than most of the others, but..."
"Are you not going to do something about that?"
"Nah, I hope it's self-terminating. Should eventually cancel itself."
"You hope?"
"Look, don't ruin this for me okay, nothing ever happens on your planets and look at ALL THIS BLOOD"
Not so fun fact: Mythicism around Proto-Indo-European is part of what made Hitler come up with the idea of "Aryans" because they hypothesized that there was some relation between the language having come from Iran (as "Urheimat") and then this leads to everyone wanting to be (indo)-aryan-decendent the most.
Hitler didn't personally come up with the idea of Aryans, in the sense of a historic ethno-linguistic group in Eurasia speaking a Indo-European language; that comes out of the scholarship of Indo-European prehistory. Which isn't to say that every 19th or 20th century scholar doing this kind of speculation was equally careful or free of ideological bias; but it's also a mistake to say that the idea of a pre-historic Aryan people is fake simply because the Nazis applied that label in a mythologized sense to gentile Germanic peoples.
Our current best understanding of the archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence (and the genetic evidence in particular became available only in the past 20 years or so), suggests that the archeological culture we label the Sintashta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sintashta_culture), who flourished on the central Asian steppes c. 2000 BC, almost certainly spoke the language we reconstruct as Proto-Indo-Iranian (that is, the descendant of Proto-Indo-European ancestral to the modern Indian and Persian languages), likely used the term "Arya" as some kind of self-designation - and when their ethno-linguistic descents showed up on the Indian subcontinent in the mid-2nd-millennium BC, this probably mostly felt like a violent invasion from the perspective of the non-Indo-European-speaking peoples already inhabiting the region.
In other words, pretty much every modern Indian or Iranian person is in fact a descendant of an ancient people we can reasonably call the Aryans even if "Sintashta culture" is a more precise archaeological term; and this is the case regardless of what Adolf Hitler thought about how this applied to ethnic Germans in his day.
Note that in the 16th century BC we can already see Indic (not Indo-Iranian, but specifically Indic) speakers ruling territory in Syria:
Now that's an interesting take. Gives "old continent" a whole new meaning ...
The next step is to add Tocharian to Babbel and Duolingo ;-)
Before that, it might be a good idea to get the Tocharian script into Unicode. It's on the roadmap: https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/ Unclear whether something specific is holding it up, or just nobody pushing it through the process.
Students of Tocharian A and B have never learned them from the native script. The native script is only for a handful of experts working directly with manuscripts; even many linguists working with Tocharian data cannot read it. Instead, one normally learns and works with these languages in a standard transliteration.
Bit of trivia: the Chinese word for honey 蜜 (Mandarin mì, Cantonese mat6, Japanese mitsu) may be a borrowing from Tocharian, cognate with the English word "mead".
Check out the cognates for arrow, car (chariot) and horse (mare)
Old school tech exchange, basically