> A friend of mine also pointed me to Tocharian, which
> was apparantly spoken along the silk road, and which
> can possibly be characterized as *the* original trade
> talk. If I understand it correctly, Tocharian
> vocabulary included words from along the entire silk
> road, meaning that a person in one end would use words
> that had originated in the other end.
A lovely idea, but when I looked it up, Tocharian seems to have been
rather more localised than that.
http://www.wlc.com/oxus/tocharia.htm
http://www.britannica.com/seo/t/tocharian-languages/
Shame.