What's an ARYAN?
October 17th 2008 22:37
WHAT'S
AN ARYAN ?
No I havent turned Neo Nazi. However I do lurk in Yahoo answers and over in the Anthropology section I see a lot of questions about ARYANS? I also see a lot of misinformation propagated by people who dont use dictionaries and Wikipedia.
Fact One: There is NOT and never has been an Aryan RACE.
The belief in a (superior) race of blonde blue eyed Teutones was a construction of the far right wing of 19th century Pan German Nationalism. They stole from the word from scholars of historical linguistics.
Fact Two
Yes Aryan was used in the later part of the 19th century and early 20th century by some historians and linguists to describe the ancestors of people who today use IndoEuropean languages, especially the Eastern languages of Iran and India.
I think somewhere in India or Eastern Europe or the stranger parts of certain American states that have VERY right wing militias some one has been reprinting out of copyright 50 year old text books to make a profit?
The term Indo-Aryan is also used to describe what are now called Indo-Iranian languages like Kuridsh and Farsi.
Fact Three "Aryan" is a Persian word?
There are five differnt theories about the orgin of the word Aryan. There'a good case for it to be traced back to not one but three or more ProtoIndoEuropean radicals. I say five cos some popele think it can be traced back to Nostratic? Yes it may be connected to Old Norse Aes(ir) Yes in its original form ARYA means noble or spiritual in Sanskrit and yes it is used in Persian or Farsi.
Aryan comes from Latin Arianus which comes from Greek which comes from a word that still means noble in Farsi. It's used for personal names and the adjective that came to us via Latin came from the name of a province in the Persian and Parthian empire - ARIANA.
Final Comments:
Check out the Oxford and Wikipedia entries on this concept and pass on the link to any confused Iranian refugees wondering why people give them strange looks which I suspect is one source of the questions. As for the other source recent genetic studies indicate that the genetic mutation that leads to a physical expression of someone being BOTH Blonde and blue eyed only dates back about 4500 years if I remember the report correctly and appeared something near the Black Sea not Central or Northern Europe!
What's Aryan a very misused adjective in English!
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