What is the Holy Ghost and what is the Holy Ghost's name?

[bob x]

You must have some seriously updated information because everything that I have read on these aforesaid peoples points to, at least a possible, East Iranian origin.

I don't know of ANYBODY who thinks the Scyths migrated from the Afghanistan area. The general view is that the old center of the Iranians was the steppes east of the Caspian, with spread in both directions, "East" Iranians being those who first went in the Hindu Kush direction, "West" Iranians those who first went in the Ukraine.

You mentioned the Sakas who always sited as Scythians.

BY WHOM? I have told you several times that I find it very annoying when you use passive voice, such-and-such "IS SAID" or "IS CLAIMED" etc. to avoid saying where you got this from. As far as I know, the origin of the Saka is mysterious; eastward-moving Scyths is one possibility, but nothing is settled.

Zoroaster, the Avestan language, even the Pashtuns have been sited as Scythians

BY WHOM? That sounds like somebody using "Scythian" just as a vague catch-all term with no specific meaning.

but I think the usage may be more of a linguistic designation for East Iranian.

That would be as crazy as using "Californian" to mean "Eastern US". The Scyths were absolutely as far west as Iranians got.

In "The Search for the Indo-Europeans" J.P. Mallory says "Linguistic evidence indicates that before the collapse of Common Slavic that is, before the fifth century AD, the Slavs had been subjected to strong linguistic influences, primarily seen in loan words, from Germanic-(Gothic) and Iranian-(Sarmation) speaking peoples. It is from the Sarmations (or the Scythians), for example, that Slavacists derive the Common Slavic words for 'god', 'holy and 'paradise' pluse perhaps several score more terms. Even the names of the major rivers of the European steppe - the Don, Dnieper and Dniester - are all of Iranian origin." See Sarmations for East Iranian origin of the Sarmations.

I disagree strongly with Mallory, inclining more to the views of his arch-rival Colin Renfrew. I also am strongly annoyed with the persistence in the literature of the gross error of thinking "Scyth" and "Sarmatian" are interchangeable terms, when all the ancient sources are clear that the two were not only distinct peoples, but fierce enemies of each other. It is difficult to distinguish which sharings between Iranian and Slavic are "borrowings" from Iranian and which are "common inheritances" from the Proto-S'atam but I would presume the latter without supporting evidence to the contrary. The statement about the river-names is just flat wrong.

This wikipedia page Alans says the Alans were a Sarmation tribe and East Iranian speaking and evolved into the Ossets who live in Iron.
See Cimmerians for Iranian origin of Cimmerians. Thought they were closely related to the Scythians and East Iranian speaking too, but now I see this site Zoroaster's People - (CAIS)© which claims the division between East and West Iranian languages is somewhat arbitrary.

East and West are sharply distinct. And Cimmerian is most certainly neither Indo-Iranian nor Balto-Slavic; it was Balkan Peripheral, more like Greek, Albanian, and Armenian, as indicated by its lack of any S'atam shift.