Aryan Blues

It's time for more rectification.

    What I'm about to say is very rarely taught in our schools, yet can be easily verified by anyone.  Many people are shocked when I give them this knowledge; some simply deny it.
I'm going to make this as quick and painless as possible.

    Between six and nine thousand years ago a people whom we call Indo-Europeans lived around the Black Sea.  The tribe began expanding; some groups moved North and West, others went South and East.  Eventually they occupied almost all of Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and parts of Central Asia.  Having spread out so far, their mother tongue had formed several distinct dialects, which eventually became mutually incomprehensible.

    This mother tongue we call Aryan, after the Sanskrit word Aryas, the name which the Indo-Europeans on the Indian subcontinent gave to themselves.  The Indo-European people are also referred to as Aryans.  This is a cultural and linguistic term, not a racial one.

    The daughter languages of Aryan are divided into Satem and Centum tongues.  The  Centum languages were Hellenic, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Anatolian, and Tocharian.  The Satem tongues were Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Baltic, Armenian, and Albanian. 

    Each of these had daughter languages as well.  The Germanic tongue, for example, begat West Germanic, East Germanic, and North Germanic.   The Italic tongue begat Osco-Umbrian and Latin.   Indo-Iranian split into Dardic, Indic, and Iranian.  And so on for the other languages.

Each of those--surprise!--also gave birth to daughter languages.

    Latin gave us: French, Romanian, Portuguese, Friulian, Catalan, Galician, Spanish, Romansch, Provencal, and the languages of the Italian peninsula (the "Italian Language is a political myth dreamed up in 1860 and reinforced under fascism and capitalism).

    The daughter languages of West Germanic are: English, German, Frisian, Flemish, Dutch, Yiddish, Scots English, and Afrikaans.  North Germanic became Old Norse, which begat Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Faroese.

    The Indic tongue evolved into Sanskrit, which gave us Hindi, Singhalese, Urdu, Punjabi, and a handful of others.

    The Tocharians just hung out in Western China until they were assimilated by some Turkic tribes.

    So the long and short of it is that Persian, Icelandic, German, Russian, Greek, and Punjabi are all Aryan tongues, and all related to English.  English, if you noticed, is a Germanic tongue.  It is not based on Greek and Latin, though it has many words from both of them.

    A more detailed breakdown of Indo-European languages is available here.  More knowledge can be had here and here.

    In the nineteenth century, certain European racists began using "Aryan" as a racial term.  Physically, there is quite a bit of diversity among Indo-Europeans; so the racists, being white, decided that Europeans were the original Aryans, while the darker Aryans of the East had obviously not kept their bloodline as "pure."  Some took it a step further and decided that since blond hair and blue eyes are most heavily concentrated in Europe, the original Aryans must have had blond hair and blue eyes.  The words "Nordic" and "Aryan" became confounded.  They even posited a Northern European origin for all of the Aryan peoples.  Oh, and of course they supposed that the Aryans were superior to all other peoples.

    All of which was rubbish, but that didn't stop the idea from being embraced in scientific circles; physical anthropology was in its infancy back then.   Stephen Jay Gould's book  The Mismeasure of Man gives an amusing--and infuriating--look at the "scientific" methods used to back up this foolishness.

    Racism infected politics on both sides of the Atlantic, with the most virulent forms appearing in Europe.  By the end of World War II, the word "Aryan" was associated in the popular mind with distasteful political ideologies, and had fallen out of favor.  It was replaced with "Indo-European."  When people to-day hear "Aryan," they associate it with the meaning that pre-war racists had given it.  I've heard it misused in this way more times than I can count, often by university students; one student I know defined "Aryans" as "blond people who want to kill everyone else."

    This has got to stop; now you know better.  Spread the word!

Comments

[Jen]

Now that is VERY interesting! I shall definitely spread the word. I'm ashamed to be one of those ignorant people who THOUGHT they knew what Aryan meant. I stand corrected :)

[Wulf]

Thanks Jen, and don't be ashamed; blame our education system :)