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Aryan (Sanskrit: आर्य ārya) is an informal and obsolete grouping of people who speak Indo-Aryan/Indo-European/Indo-Iranian languages. The term comes from the Hindu Vedas, in which it describes the noble one and may in fact be a derivative of the name used by the Proto-Indo-Europeans for themselves. The Indo-Europeans are speculated to have been a group of nomads who supposedly settled in or were native to Iran and India sometime in 1500 BCE. It is unsure where they originally came from, but it was most likely the Eurasian steppes, near the Caspian Sea (later occupied within historical times by the Scythians
).
The term is alleged to survive to modern times in the autonyms of some Indo-European descendants, most notably in the name of the Indo-Iranian-speaking Middle Eastern country known as Iran. It may also underlie the name of Ireland (Irish: Éire, gen. Éireann), but there are other, competing etymologies.[note 1]
The Indo-Europeans brought with them their indigenous religions and religious beliefs, which then fused with the native Dravidian beliefs. Much has been made of the connections between Indra and Thor, for example. They also brought their own language. The original understanding of the relationship between India, Iran, and Europe actually came about once haughty Europeans realized that their languages were all related to Sanskrit.[note 2] You would think this would have tamed their racist colonialism, but apparently not.
No, they weren't Nordic[edit]
Contrary to the Nazi meme, there is no reason to believe that the Indo-Europeans were blond or blue-eyed.[2] Nor is there any reason to believe that the Indo-Europeans ever came to Europe before early historic times, at least not until Neolithic immigration from the Russian steppes to Europe and the adoption across the continent of Proto-Indo-European dialects[note 3] by the fair-skinned European natives.[note 4]
The only people who have a claim to the "Aryan" ethnicity are natives in west, central and parts of south Asia groups who live in areas like Northern India (the entire country isn't Aryan there is a lot of non Aryan people, especially in the south), Iran ("Land of the Aryans"), Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan.
Modern European natives are a rather mixed-up lot, with many having ancestry traceable back thousands of years by way of their genes, though with bits and pieces of various other groups from around Europe, western Asia, and North Africa (not to mention some Neanderthal ancestry); their genetics are much less Aryan than their languages.[3]
In conclusion, Hitler was a dipshit, Jesus was Jewish, and unless you are part of an Indo-Aryan ethnic group (such as Northern Indian, Iranian, or Roma),[note 5] you are not an Aryan. There is no genetic evidence that a distinct Aryan race even existed.[4]
See also[edit]
- Indigenous Aryans theory
- Indo-European languages
- Marija Gimbutas
- Nationalist pseudohistory
- Nazism
- Sanskrit
- The Chalice and the Blade
- White supremacy
External links[edit]
- Who were the Aryans?, The Straight Dope
Further reading[edit]
- Deshpande, Madhav, ed (1979). Aryan and Non-Aryan in India. Ann Arbor, MI: U OF M CENTER FOR SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES. ISBN 978-0-89148-014-3.
Notes[edit]
- ↑ The more commonly accepted explanation derives the name from Proto-Indo-European **piHwer-, meaning "fat" or "fertile"; this would make the name cognate with Greek Pieria. Initial *p- is regularly lost in Celtic languages: PIE *ph₂tḗr, "father"; Irish athair; *pisk-, "fish"; Irish iasc.[1]:261
- ↑ Sanskrit looks startlingly similar to Greek and Latin in many grammatical structures (the noun declensions are very Latinate, if a bit more complex, and the verbal system is very close to Homeric Greek) and was once rumored to be mutually intercomprehensible with, of all things, Lithuanian, one of the most complex and primitive Indo-European languages surviving into modern times.
- ↑ Celtic over a wide area from Anatolia to Britain and Spain; Italic in Italy; Hellenic in Greece, western Anatolia, and the southern Balkans; Germanic in Scandinavia; Slavic in what is now Western Russia; and many other languages of unknown relation (though Phrygian is thought to be ancestral to Armenian and Illyrian to Albanian).
- ↑ The original languages of Stone Age Europe survived in historical times only in small pockets -- Etruscan in Italy until Roman times, Basque in Spain and France into modern times, Finno-Ugric languages in Northern Europe and a large pocket in Hungary and Romania (where they represent a historic migration). Neal Stephenson's fictional Qwghlm language from Cryptonomicon is probably intended to be one of these as well.
- ↑ You can taste the irony as Hitler ordered the killing of Roma in the Holocaust.
References[edit]
- ↑ Mallory, J. P.; Adams, Douglas Q. (2007). The Oxford introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European world. Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-19-929668-2.
- ↑ Hock, Hans Henrich (2003-12-31). Did Indo-European linguistics prepare the ground for Nazism? Lessons from the past for the present and the future. DE GRUYTER MOUTON. pp. 167–188. ISBN 978-3-11-017648-3. Retrieved 2024-09-26.
- ↑ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1881/02/who-are-the-aryans/521367/
- ↑ Ishaan Tharoor (December 15, 2011). "The Aryan Race: Time to Forget About It?".