Parallele Texte im Tocharischen und ihre Bewertung.

• Author: Pinault, Georges-Jean
• Position: Review

Parallele Texte im Tocharischen und ihre Bewertung. By WERNER THOMAS. Sitzungsberichte der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, vol. 30, no. 5. Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 1993. Pp. 58. DM 48.

The purpose of this booklet is to analyze phenomena that are met in parallel texts written in the two Tocharian languages. This philological contribution shows the general characteristics of much of the work produced by the author: in a dry manner it offers a great mass of minute details, but these data are neither clearly ordered nor placed in a picture that would touch questions of a more general interest, both for the linguists specialized in the history of those languages and for the scholars involved in research on Buddhist literature, especially in Central Asia. Parallel texts can be defined as texts that exist in multiple copies, either in the same language (mostly in Tocharian B), or--more rarely--in the two different languages (Tocharian A and Tocharian B). Not surprisingly, the bulk of the work has two main sections that deal respectively with convergences ("Ubereinstimmungen in Inhalt und Sprache," pp. 8-25) and divergences ("Abweichungen in der inhaltlichen und sprachlichen Gestaltung," pp. 26-40) . A third section (pp. 41-47), given as a short appendix, concerns texts which are preserved both in Tocharian A and in Tocharian B, with a similar division. The monograph ends with a final discussion (pp. 48-58) that gives no definitive conclusion: it recapitulates some of the examples analyzed before, but introduces also some new material that was not previously discussed. The results of this superficially careful research are rather disappointing. The general idea is the following: the writers of Tocharian manuscripts were not servile copyists, and they allowed themselves a rather large range of variations in the rendering of a text. One may agree with the author that much philological research has still to be done on this interesting topic, and that the painstaking work has in some sense no end. Nevertheless, such a research should be undertaken with a certain method, in order to draw clear criteria that could account for the variants among copies of the same text in the same language. Otherwise, the risk is to accumulate facts without any viewpoint about important issues, such as local practices of scribes, dialectal divergences (in Tocharian B, along the line of the pioneer work...