Lecture | Summer School evening lectures
Patterns of language contact in the Tarim Basin in Northwest China
- Date
- Thursday 13 July 2023
- Time
- Series
- Summer School evening lectures
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 003
Abstract
The Tarim Basin in Northwest China is known for its rich yield of manuscript remains in a large variety of different languages, most of them belonging to the Indo-European language family. Of these, Khotanese and Tocharian have the longest prehistory in the region, while Indic has arguably had the largest impact. In this talk, I will illustrate how patterns of language contact between the ancient Tarim Basin languages can be linked to the relative chronology of the individual languages, and sketch some broader tendencies of cultural influence.