Body and soul: the reflexive in Tocharian

Abstract

Both Tocharian languages have a noun meaning ‘self, person’ which is used also as reflexive pronoun: TB āñme , TA āñcäm . This noun is the match of Skt. ātman -, which is used in the philosophical sense in Buddhist texts. Vis-à-vis the usage of Skt. ātman - as reflexive pronoun, Toch. uses the phrase TB ṣañ āñm , TA ṣñi āñcäm , the first element of which is the possessive reflexive (‘one’s own’) referring to all persons and numbers. No fully satisfactory account of the etymology of CToch. * āñcmæ (> TB āñme , TA āñcäm ) has yet been presented. It is proposed to derive it from a binomial phrase meaning ‘breath’+‘flesh, body’, hence ‘whole body, person’. PIE etymologies of the two components are provided. This phrase would be parallel to Old Turkic ät’öz ‘(own) body’ and ‘self’, the second element of which ( öz ) is used also as reflexive pronoun. Then the Tocharian development of the reflexive pronoun is evaluated from a typological point of view. It appears that CToch. had selected as reflexive a noun referring to the person, the whole body, which served also to render the Skt. term ātman - in Buddhist texts. The specific reflexive pronoun was made through using in combination the reflex of the PIE stem * s u̯ é (actually the genitive form matching the possessive * s u̯ ó - of other languages) in order to make an emphatic or heavy reflexive, CToch. * ṣäñ āñcmæ ‘one’s own self’, that was generalized