Rédacteurs et copistes de textes tokhariens

Georges-Jean Pinault (1)

1 Mondes Iranien et Indien - UMR 7528

The copyists of Tocharian B texts endeavored to normalize their own language. The whole process was certainly not exempt of conflicting trends, between modernization to new standards and pseudo-archaism. The various aspects of the adaptation of a previous text is exemplified by the comparison of two versions of the same poetical text, which contains the telling in verse of several Buddhist edifying stories, albeit much summarized. The fist version (BM 163) is in old ductus and mostly in archaic language, while the other (THT 3602) is in standard ductus and normalized language, despite few archaic forms. Furthemore, they are composed in different meters. It is shown that these metrical texts represent two divergent later rewritings, which have been copied at different dates and in two different places, on the basis of an archetype in archaic language (ca. 5th century CE), which was most probably in prose.

Analyse de manuscrits tokhariens (en tokharien B), qui prouvent l'adaptation d'un texte original en prose sous deux formes versifiées qui présentent des différences, connues par les fragments BM 163 et THT 3602. Chronologie interne des manuscrits tokhariens. Relation entre l'évolution de l'écriture, l'évolution du tokharien et les contraintes métriques.

Mots clés: Buddhist narratives; Buddhist literature; Tocharian literature; Tocharian language; Tocharian metrics; Tocharian manuscripts; Linguistic variation; Tocharian palaeography

Domaines: Linguistique

Georges-Jean Pinault. Rédacteurs et copistes de textes tokhariens. Nalini Balbir; Maria Szuppe. Lecteurs et copistes dans les traditions manuscrites iraniennes, indiennes et centrasiatiques, 12, Istituto per l'Oriente-Roma/Orientalisches Institut der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, pp.41-80, 2014, Eurasian Studies, 978-88-97622-20-8. ⟨halshs-01446347⟩