Aryan

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
A long way from Germany.
The colorful pseudoscience
Race & Racialism
Icon race.svg
Hating thy neighbour
Divide and conquer
Dog-whistlers

Aryan (Sanskrit: आर्य, romanized as ā́rya) is an informal grouping of people who speak Indo-Iranian languages (either Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, or Nuristani). 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-Iranians for themselves. The Indo-Iranins are thought to have been comprised of various cultures (most notably the Sintashta and Andronovo cultures) that originated in Russia and moved through into Kazakhstan and eventually into India and Iran sometime in 1500 BCE.

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 West Asian country known as Iran (New Persian: اِیرَان, romanized as Īrān; Middle Persian: 𐭠𐭩𐭥𐭠𐭭, romanized as Ērān; Old Persian: 𐎠𐎼𐎡𐎹, romanized as Ariyaʰ; Avestan: 𐬀𐬌𐬭𐬌𐬌𐬀, romanized as airiia). 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 literally no reason to believe that the Indo-Iranians were blond or blue-eyed.[2] Nor is there any reason to believe that the Indo-Iranians 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 the west, central and south parts of Asia who live in areas like northern, western, and parts of Eastern India. The entire country isn't Aryan; there are a lot of non-Aryan people, especially in the south, northeast, most notable the Dravidians, in addition to the Sino-Tibetans in the Himādri (i.e., Greater Himalayas) (in Sanskrit: हिमाद्रि)), notably Adivasis), Iran ("Land of the Aryans"), Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan.

Modern Indo-Iranian 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 northern Africa (not to mention some Neanderthal ancestry); their genetics also show mixture with indigenous Elamo-Dravidians.[3]

In conclusion, Hitler was a dipshit, Jesus was a Jew, and unless you are part of an Indo-Aryan ethnic group (Indian or Iranian like the Romani people),[note 5] you are not an Aryan.

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

Further reading[edit]

  • Deshpande, Madhav; Hook, Peter; Hook, Peter Edwin, eds. (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]

  1. 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
  2. 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 rumoured to be mutually intercomprehensible with, of all things, Lithuanian, one of the most complex and primitive Indo-European languages surviving into modern times.
  3. 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).
  4. 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.
  5. You can taste the irony as Hitler ordered the killing of the Romas in the Holocaust.

References[edit]

  1. 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.
  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. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  3. John Fiske, Who are the Aryans? Archived from The Atlantic, February 1881.