JP Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans, mentions that
the Tocharian documents of the 6-8th century include "magic
spells and herbal recipes". I already have Ji Xianlin's
work, Fragments of the Tocharian A Maitreyasasmiti-Nataka
of the Xinjiang Museum, China... which unfortuneately, while
it is marvelous to see these ancient documents, are only
Tocharian copies of Buddhist scripture.
The manifest similarity of Tocharian and Old Gothic, and
the innumerable examples of fabric technology seen in 'The
Mummies of Urumchi" by EW Barber, tie the Tocharians and
the Celts to a common cultural root, which I think can be
seen in the Cucuteni of Rumania and the transylvanian Alps.
If you are familiar with the 'witchcraft movement' the
significance of Transylvania is obvious. Innumerable books
are being foisted on the public purporting to have ancient
witchcraft and occult knowledge. The Tocharian documents
are, however, an authenitic source, and would expose this
fraud; for at the very time when the Christian monks in
Europe were burning everything they could lay hands on, these
brown, red, & blonde haired -Buddhist- monks in the East
were making copies of what they saw as an ancestral heritage.
I have ordered Douglas' work on the morphology of Tocharian,
and hopefully, Amazon can find it. In any event, I will need
to get jpg/gif copies of the original documents, and wonder
what part of the corpus is in Britian.
While I lack skill in Indo-European languages, I can work
with assembly and batch languages, and can produce a font in
the 120 character Tocharian alphabet, and port that into a
text editor, possibly even OCR, and use software to do word
searches for relevant portions of what appears to be a rather
large collection of docuements. If I can get copies.
I don't know that you can do this in windoz; In dos, I can
assign a hexadecimal value to each letter, and it is fairly
straighforward after that to setup text string tools.
-- Arachne V1.50;beta, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://home.arachne.cz/
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