 7th century CE), the Silk Road's lingua franca in Central Asia was Sogdian, along which it amassed a rich vocabulary by loanwords such as "tym" ("hotel") from the Middle Chinese /tem/ ().The economic and political importance of Sogdian guaranteed its survival in the first few centuries after the Muslim conquest of Sogdia in the early eighth century.A dialect of Sogdian spoken around the 8th century in Osrushana (capital