Cladistic Studies of the Tocharian Verb : Archaisms, Innovations, and the Position of Tocharian within Indo-European (Brill's Studies in Indo-european Languages & Linguistics)

In the past decades, the idea that Tocharian separated from the Indo-European language family as the second branch has become prominent in the Indo-European scholarship despite the fact that there is very little agreement about the evidence used to substantiate this hypothesis. The position of Tocharian in the family tree is important, not only for our understanding of the development of the Tocharian languages, but also for our knowledge of the (pre)history of the Tocharian speakers. In this book, Louise S. Friis investigates the Tocharian verb in search of significant evidence for the Tocharian Second hypothesis and finds that most of it does not hold up to critical comparative-historical analysis.