Pascale Eskes is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Linguistics

More information about Pascale Eskes

Fields of interest 

• Comparative Indo-European linguistics 
• Historical phonology 
• Etymology 
• Language contact 
• Iranian, Tocharian, Germanic, Slavic 
• Science outreach

Research

My PhD research is part of the ERC project “The Silk Road Language Web” led by Prof. dr. Michaël Peyrot and focuses on the influence of the Middle Iranian languages Sogdian and Bactrian on Tocharian and Khotanese. It investigates how linguistic evidence of language contact can contribute to our knowledge of these languages and their history. To this end, I will conduct a systematic investigation into Sogdian and Bactrian loanwords and the historical context in which they were adopted into Tocharian and Khotanese. Part of my research will focus on phonological correspondences to attempt to establish a chronology for the loanwords and identify different degrees of contact with close relatives or earlier stages of the languages involved. I will additionally analyse the semantic domains of the loanwords in order to gain more insight into the circumstances that gave rise to these periods of language contact.