Yahweh-yireh

[mojobadshah]

Back when Mary Boyce had published A History of Zoroastrianism she claimed that most of the "gods" names mentioned in the Avesta and the Vedas were found to be exclusively Indo-Iranian. But how true is this today? Because I've notice several similarities between the names of gods in Iranian and Sumerian as well as the Afro-Asiatic gods. One is the Assyrian Ashura "the great god" which resembles the Indo-Iranian Ahura Mazda/Asura/Aesir, and another one is Ashtorteth which resembles the Indo-Iranian Ushastara. And it may also be interesting to note the resemblance between the name Elohim and Elam as in the Elamites, the aboriginal inhabitants of the Iranian plateau. And now I know why yireh sounded familiar to me. According to Robert Wright Yireh in the archaic Hebrew form Yahweh-yireh came from the Hebrew word yareah "moon" and the Ugartic speakers worshipped a moon god named Yarih. And then there's the Avestan form Yarah which etymologically translates to year. So does Mary Boyce's claim still hold today or not? Also Yahweh-Yireh is also used as a place-name, but does it have anything to do with Mecca. In an earlier thread I pointed out a possible connection between the place name Mecca and "Moon Worship." And both place-names do point to some form of moon worship. My etymology for Mecca was that this place-name developed from the Persian form Ma "moon" + gah "place." And now that I recall the Zoroastrians divide their days and prayers into 5 gahs and Muslims also pray 5 times a day.

 

[bob x]

Back when Mary Boyce had published A History of Zoroastrianism she claimed that most of the "gods" names mentioned in the Avesta and the Vedas were found to be exclusively Indo-Iranian. But how true is this today? Because I've notice several similarities between the names of gods in Iranian and Sumerian as well as the Afro-Asiatic gods. One is the Assyrian Ashura "the great god" which resembles the Indo-Iranian Ahura Mazda/Asura/Aesir

This is one case where I do think the direction of borrowing FROM Iran TO the Semites looks like the best explanation.

and another one is Ashtorteth which resembles the Indo-Iranian Ushastara.

I have only seen the name as Ushas, without that -tara suffix; however, a similar suffix occurs on Eostre, Germanic goddess of dawn / spring / east (compare Greek Eos without the suffix; Italic was Ausosa but "s" between vowels shifted to "r" hence Aurora in Latin). This may also be the same root as star, Greek aster, Latin stella but compare Hebrew Esther. It is not clear whether this is a sharing between Indo-European and Semitic, though I think it probable; the direction of the borrowing, if any, is also unclear.

And it may also be interesting to note the resemblance between the name Elohim and Elam as in the Elamites, the aboriginal inhabitants of the Iranian plateau.

"Aboriginal" means the PREVIOUS inhabitants: the NON-Iranians who used to live there. Their language was akin to the Dravidian group, once widespread across India and Iran but now confined to southern India: the Tamil Tigers sought an independent state of Tamil Eelam where that word Eelam for "nation" is the same as Elam. There is no relationship to Elohim in which -im is not part of the root.

And now I know why yireh sounded familiar to me. According to Robert Wright Yireh in the archaic Hebrew form Yahweh-yireh came from the Hebrew word yareah "moon"

No, yireh is the word "sees".

and the Ugartic speakers worshipped a moon god named Yarih.

No they didn't. Ugaritic for the moon god is Etrach, related to Khashdic Atrash borrowed into Greek as Atlas (the moon is the planet which holds up all the other heavens) and possibly akin to Abraham's father's name Terach.

And then there's the Avestan form Yarah which etymologically translates to year.

Which has no relevance to anything. In yireh "sees", the y- is the third-person-singular prefix, analogous to the -s on "sees".

My etymology for Mecca was that this place-name developed from the Persian form Ma "moon" + gah "place."

Which is rubbish, since the older form is Makoraba.

And now that I recall the Zoroastrians divide their days and prayers into 5 gahs and Muslims also pray 5 times a day.

Except that the 5 gahs total 24 hours; where the Muslims are dividing the daylight hours only into four, with prayers at the start (dawn), between the 1st and 2nd fourth (mid-morning), between the 2nd and 3rd fourth (noon), between the 3rd and 4th (midafternoon), and at the end (sundown). The systems are not actually similar.

 

[radarmark]

Oh boy, another bx-mojo seminar! You gotta know I will soak this up!

 

[Dream]

Oh boy, another bx-mojo seminar! You gotta know I will soak this up!

Nothing rhymes with patience like patients. I go through these threads too, and some of it is starting to sink in.

 

[mojobadshah]

This is one case where I do think the direction of borrowing FROM Iran TO the Semites looks like the best explanation.

Wikipedia says that the name is probably a deified form of the place-name Ashur and the place-name dates back to the 3rd millennium BC. At first look it would appear, however, that Ashur is a contraction of the name of the deity Ashura. Does all of this sound right?

I have only seen the name as Ushas, without that -tara suffix; however, a similar suffix occurs on Eostre, Germanic goddess of dawn / spring / east (compare Greek Eos without the suffix; Italic was Ausosa but "s" between vowels shifted to "r" hence Aurora in Latin). This may also be the same root as star, Greek aster, Latin stella but compare Hebrew Esther. It is not clear whether this is a sharing between Indo-European and Semitic, though I think it probable; the direction of the borrowing, if any, is also unclear.

You're right. My understanding is that Ushas is the angel of the Dawn in Zoroastrianism, but Ushastaran means East. But here again, at first look, it would appear to me that even Ashtorteth appears to be a contraction of Ushastaran and -teth appears to be an affix of some sort.

"Aboriginal" means the PREVIOUS inhabitants: the NON-Iranians who used to live there. Their language was akin to the Dravidian group, once widespread across India and Iran but now confined to southern India: the Tamil Tigers sought an independent state of Tamil Eelam where that word Eelam for "nation" is the same as Elam. There is no relationship to Elohim in which -im is not part of the root.

So the Elamite and Dravidian languages are definitely related? Elamite texts were contemporary to the Sumerian texts, and Assyrian appear later, right, but was there ever any overlapping? Like did the Assyrians end up displacing the Elamites like the Vedic people displaced the Dravidians?

No, yireh is the word "sees".

No they didn't. Ugaritic for the moon god is Etrach, related to Khashdic Atrash borrowed into Greek as Atlas (the moon is the planet which holds up all the other heavens) and possibly akin to Abraham's father's name Terach.

Which has no relevance to anything. In yireh "sees", the y- is the third-person-singular prefix, analogous to the -s on "sees".

"Given that the inanimate hunks of orbiting rock aren't the kinds of things you generally converse with, scholars have long wondered whther the Hebrew word for moon-yareah-in this scripture refers to a moon god. This suspician grew when Ugaritic texts revealed the existence of a late-second-millenium Canaanite moon god named Yarih." - Robert Wright, The Evolution of God pg. 157

You did point out the Hebrew association with the Lunar calendar too. You still don't think there's a connection here?

Which is rubbish, since the older form is Makoraba.

The Pentateuch and book of Joshua: critically examined, Volume 5 pg. 272

OK, I did a quick investigation and I it appears that Ptolemy is the one who gave the name Makoraba. Even Makoraba sounds like an Iranian possibly Ma-Khor-Aba (cf. OIran. aban "water") "Moon eats water" The source says one translation is "to suck out," but maybe it was some kind of trinity "Moon Sun Water" because Khor also means "sun" in Iranian. Another translation uses Hebrew to interpret the meaning to "Great Slaughter" or Makka-Rabba, but because they associate the site with the word kherem which apparently means "slaughter" in Arabic or "eat" in Persian (cf. Mantikhor "man eater"). I think that Makka-Rabba may very well have originally been akin to the form Mag-Rab "Great Rabbi" (Zoroastrian Magi?) but came to signify where these Great Rabbi were slaughtered, and was later substituted with the word Makkah which is derived from the Iranian Mah + Gah "Moon Worship," which is how easterners recall it, probably to cover up the fact that the site used to be associated with these "Great Rabbi." Any thoughts?

 

[bob x]

Wikipedia says that the name is probably a deified form of the place-name Ashur

Well, it is frequently hard to tell whether the name of a people, of the place they live, and of their patron deity started out referring to the people, place, or god. The center of worship of Usire "Osiris" was an Egyptian city called Busire "the place of Usire"-- but wait, does that mean "the place of the god Usire" or "the place of the clan Usire" (predominant family there) or just "the main place in the region Usire" (as the surrounding territory was called)? Were the people named for the place they lived, or vice versa? And was the patron deity named for the people or place, or vice versa? Maybe that's a wrong question: the name may have always been used in all three senses interchangeably.

and the place-name dates back to the 3rd millennium BC.

I didn't realize it was that old. If so, either the Indo-European etymology is wrong-- or you have indeed made a case for an earlier presence of Indo-Europeans than I expected.

My understanding is that Ushas is the angel of the Dawn in Zoroastrianism, but Ushastaran means East.

Analogous to Greek Eos "dawn" (without the affix) vs. English East, Easter (with the affix).

But here again, at first look, it would appear to me that even Ashtorteth appears to be a contraction of Ushastaran and -teth appears to be an affix of some sort.

You have inserted an extra "t" into Ashtoreth "goddesses" in which the -eth is indeed an affix, for feminine plural: the singular in Aramaic is Ashtart where the final -t is feminine singular, so in Hebrew where the feminine singular suffix erodes to -ah we should expect the singular to be *Ashtarah but instead we get Asherah with the first "t" irregularly disappearing, though reappearing in the plural Ashtoreth. Clearly related in Semitic are the Akkadian Ishtar and the name Esther which wandered into late Hebrew from somewhere.

The similarities to the Indo-European root for east (and dawn/spring) are undeniable; the similarity to the star root is even closer. These were separate words in Indo-European and not confused with each other; but possibly derive from a single root back in some remoter predecessor than Proto-Indo-European. It is possible that this match between Semitic and Indo-European is not a borrowing in either direction, but rather a common inheritance from the "Nostratic" common ancestor (back 10,000 years or so).

So the Elamite and Dravidian languages are definitely related?

Linguists argue about everything; but I think McAlpin makes a persuasive case. If the commonalities he has listed are not from common ancestry, then they represent a lot of contact and borrowing; the word Elam "nation" is to my mind one of the most striking.

Elamite texts were contemporary to the Sumerian texts, and Assyrian appear later, right, but was there ever any overlapping?

Elamite was surprisingly long-lived: the great Behistun inscription by king Darius of the Achaemenid Persians was trilingual in Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite (this was key to the decipherment of cuneiform).

Like did the Assyrians end up displacing the Elamites like the Vedic people displaced the Dravidians?

Assyria was far northern Iraq (west of the upper Tigris). Elam was far southern Iran (east of the Shatt). Elam was infiltrated by Persians, of course; but is now a predominately Arabic-speaking area, called Khuzistan or often still called Ilam.

"Given that the inanimate hunks of orbiting rock aren't the kinds of things you generally converse with, scholars have long wondered whther the Hebrew word for moon-yareah-in this scripture refers to a moon god. This suspician grew when Ugaritic texts revealed the existence of a late-second-millenium Canaanite moon god named Yarih." - Robert Wright, The Evolution of God pg. 157

This author has little empathy with religious attitudes (he has some of the "angry atheist" in him) and doesn't really get ancient attitudes at all. The Hebrew yareah is a poetic word for the Moon, meaning "what makes it possible to see" (at night; same root as in the simpler "sees" but a more complex derivative); another poetic term is laban "pale white", also seen in the "Lebanon" mountains (from their being snow-capped), and as the name of Jacob's wily father-in-law. Both these poetic words are ancient, since we find them in Ugaritic-- but they are not explicitly used as a name for the god of the moon; a Hebrew poet who says he is "talking to the moon" is not necessarily speaking to deity anymore than a modern poet who says he is "talking to the trees". It is conceivable that these words were used as taboo-substitutions for a "true name" of the moon-god; but evidence is lacking.

You did point out the Hebrew association with the Lunar calendar too.

Hebrews used the moon for time-keeping just like EVERY OTHER people in the world who kept track of time at all.

Ptolemy is the one who gave the name Makoraba. Even Makoraba sounds like an Iranian possibly Ma-Khor-Aba (cf. OIran. aban "water") "Moon eats water"

SIGH... linguists have a saying, "Look for Latin etymologies first on the Tiber." That is, if a word in Latin has a perfectly sensible explanation within Latin, there is no excuse to go hunting among languages thousands of miles away. At what time do you imagine Persian-speakers living anywhere near Mecca? The Achaemenids at their height never got near there. Within Semitic, the m- is a participial prefix for "doing [such-and-such]" or "one who does [such-and-such]" as in Muhammad "one who gives praise" from the root h-m-d "to praise"; in Makoraba the root is k-r-b "to track time; regulate the calendar" as in the makrab, title of the high priest in Saba ("Sheba"; ancient kingdom in Yemen) who usurped authority from the queens in some periods. The root is best known in the kerub "cherub", from whose Aramaic plural kruviyn we get Greek gruphon, Latin griffin, a beast combining the hindquarters of a bull (Taurus), foreparts of a lion (Leo), wings of an eagle (Scorpio, seen as a bird rather than a scorpion in the Mideast; the Egyptian sphinx had a falcon's beak instead of the eagle-wings), and face of a man (Aquarius). These were the four astrological signs of the solstices and equinoxes c. 2000 BC when astrology became standardized; note that the concept of a "Zodiac" of 12 signs is purely Mideastern in origin, not Indo-European except by very late borrowing.

The site of Mecca is below the Tropic of Cancer, so that the sun is briefly to the north around summer solstice, and will be straight overhead, shining to the bottom of a deep well, just before and just after. The sacred well (note: the Qur'anic account is that this well was already there in Abraham's time) was near three standing stones (again, unlike the Ka'aba which Muslims believe Abraham built, these stones are associated with the pre-Abrahamic pagan past; part of the hajj ritual is to throw rocks at them as a symbolic repudiation of heathenism, "pilgrims pelt the pillars with pebbles to purge paganism"). The well and stones have been replaced many times, but the traditional Arabic name of the tall stone is "the tracker", indicating that it was an obelisk: the purpose of making a "sundial" post very tall and pointy is so that you can see not only the daily west/east motion but also the seasonal north/south of the shadow-tip (as in Egypt, where they also had a sacred well by Syene, right at the Tropic of Cancer, now unfortunately drowned by the Aswan Dam; Eratosthenes used the facts that the sun was straight overhead at the Syene well, that the distance from Syene to Alexandria was measurable to some accuracy, and that the angle of the sun from vertical at Alexandria could be precisely measured by tall obelisks, to compute the circumference of the Earth). The short low stone was traditionally called "the table" and was originally an altar, allegedly once for human sacrifice. The other stone has no traditional name except "the middle sized" and was probably just a cairn (stone-pile) positioned to mark the direction from the obelisk of sunrise or sunset at some seasonal point (like the alignment of the standing stones at Stonehenge, or of the "medicine wheels" in North America). The site was an astronomical observatory (hence the reason for bringing a big black meteorite there; where else would you keep a rock that fell from the sky, but the Observatory?) whose ancient name straightforwardly derives from its function.

The source says one translation is "to suck out," but maybe it was some kind of trinity "Moon Sun Water" because Khor also means "sun" in Iranian.

In VERY LATE Iranian: the velar fricative arose in medieval times from the Avestan hwar, where the "h" of course is a shift from the "s" and the "r" a shift from the "l" in forms of the sun root like Latin sol. You are wanting to derive a velar stop "k" from a fricative "kh" which didn't even exist in the word until medieval Persian, centuries after Ptolemy already has the name. And of course, you are assuming that people form place-names by just arbitrarily sticking nouns one after another, which is not how things work in any language.

Another translation uses Hebrew to interpret the meaning to "Great Slaughter" or Makka-Rabba, but because they associate the site with the word kherem which apparently means "slaughter" in Arabic

At some point the k-r-b root fell out of common usage, and the name "Makoraba" got two re-interpretations ("folk etymology" is what it is called when a name that has become mysterious is interpreted some new way, like "sparrow grass" for asparagus or "horse radish" for arvorachia): one as Mukarima "the magnificent" (the root k-r-m actually means "to be wonderful", as in Kareem, a name for God also used as a common personal name; "slaughter"???? could hardly be further from the meaning), which is still part of the Saudi official name for the city; and also the parsing as Makka-Rabba "Mecca the great" (where Makka by itself doesn't mean anything, either in Arabic or any other Semitic language).

I think that Makka-Rabba may very well have originally been akin to the form Mag-Rab "Great Rabbi" (Zoroastrian Magi?)

It is quite possible that this is a similar reparsing of makrab "high priest; calendar regulator"; but this would be within Semitic, since the root rab "great" (as in Hebrew rabbi "my superior") does not exist in Iranian or any other Indo-European branch, only in Semitic. If Iranian mag is connected to Mag-Rab, the borrowing is FROM Mesopotamia TO Iran: there is no clear etymology within Indo-European for mag, which does have resemblance to Indo-European words like Latin maior "major" or Sanskrit maha "great" (compare other m- words of quantity like English many, much, more, most) but the "g" is mysterious. Note that in the Greek authors, magos is used as often for "Chaldean" (that is, Mesopotamian) astrologers as for Iranian ones.

and was later substituted with the word Makkah which is derived from the Iranian Mah + Gah "Moon Worship,"

Will you please stop with this mah-gah rubbish? Your source was a 15th century book that tries to pretend that everything in the world is Persian; the author of that book was notably ignorant, didn't even know that Medina is Arabic for "[political] state" and was explicitly named that by Muhammad because that is where he first took political control-- such a central event in Islamic history that one would have expected any Muslim to have heard about it.

 

[bob x]

Minor correction: the plural of Aramaic Ashtart, Hebrew Asherah is Ashtaroth "goddesses". I confused -oth, suffix for feminine plural, with -eth, which is "constructive case"; both suffixes replace the -t or -ah of feminine singular nominative, constructive case also involving some vowel replacements. "Constructive" is not a case that occurs in Indo-European; in a possessor-and-possessed situation, the Semitic languages specially mark the possessed, while Indo-European languages mark the possessor. Example: we would say David's son or David's house, marking the possessor ("David") with a special "genitive case" affix (apostrophe-s) while "son" and "house" (possessed by David) are left alone in the normal ("nominative case") form; but Hebrew says ben Dawid "son-of David" and beth Dawid "house-of David" with Dawid left unaltered, but ben and beth put into constructive case (no affix, since they are masculine nouns; but a minor vowel-shift, long-e in the nominative contracting to short-e for the constructive). To make a long story short (if it is not already too late!), the form Ashtoreth actually means "goddess-of [something]"; it would be used in a compound like Ashtoreth ha-aviv "goddess of the springtime".

 

[mojobadshah]

I didn't realize it was that old. If so, either the Indo-European etymology is wrong-- or you have indeed made a case for an earlier presence of Indo-Europeans than I expected.

That's what wikipedia says. Ashur

Assyria was far northern Iraq (west of the upper Tigris). Elam was far southern Iran (east of the Shatt). Elam was infiltrated by Persians, of course; but is now a predominately Arabic-speaking area, called Khuzistan or often still called Ilam.

Well I got another question for ya BX: the velar fricative is quite frequent in the Aryan languages, but what about other Indo-European languages, the Indic languages in particular, and also the Afro-Asiatic languages like Assyrian?

This author has little empathy with religious attitudes (he has some of the "angry atheist" in him) and doesn't really get ancient attitudes at all. The Hebrew yareah is a poetic word for the Moon, meaning "what makes it possible to see" (at night; same root as in the simpler "sees" but a more complex derivative); another poetic term is laban "pale white", also seen in the "Lebanon" mountains (from their being snow-capped), and as the name of Jacob's wily father-in-law. Both these poetic words are ancient, since we find them in Ugaritic-- but they are not explicitly used as a name for the god of the moon; a Hebrew poet who says he is "talking to the moon" is not necessarily speaking to deity anymore than a modern poet who says he is "talking to the trees". It is conceivable that these words were used as taboo-substitutions for a "true name" of the moon-god; but evidence is lacking.

Ok, but are you saying that there's no association with the Hebrew yareah and the moon?

Hebrews used the moon for time-keeping just like EVERY OTHER people in the world who kept track of time at all.

All the more reason for a people to have deified the moon somewhere along the lines, right?

At what time do you imagine Persian-speakers living anywhere near Mecca? The Achaemenids at their height never got near there.

That has got to be a lie. First off the Achaemenids frontiers reached as west as the Danube, Macedon, and Ethiopia. Arabia lies between the Aryan zone, and the Danube, Macedon, and Ethiopia. The Cyropedia specifically mentions the Arabs as one of the conquered people's under Cyrus the Great's rule. Acheamenid inscriptions from Darius's time mention Arabia as one of the people's within their sphere of influence.

It is quite possible that this is a similar reparsing of makrab "high priest; calendar regulator"; but this would be within Semitic, since the root rab "great" (as in Hebrew rabbi "my superior") does not exist in Iranian or any other Indo-European branch, only in Semitic.

No, but the Aryan language does contain the word Raspi which is an official of the priestly cast in Zoroastrianism. I'm not sure about the exact root of the word, but maybe the in Raspi eroded and the [p] hardened to a to become Rabbi similar to how the [v] in the Heb. Ivri "travel" or [p] in the Heb. hapar "spy" hardened to a hard to become to word Hebrew in the Hebrew language. Or maybe it was Heparu originally a [p]

If Iranian mag is connected to Mag-Rab, the borrowing is FROM Mesopotamia TO Iran: there is no clear etymology within Indo-European for mag, which does have resemblance to Indo-European words like Latin maior "major" or Sanskrit maha "great" (compare other m- words of quantity like English many, much, more, most) but the "g" is mysterious. Note that in the Greek authors, magos is used as often for "Chaldean" (that is, Mesopotamian) astrologers as for Iranian ones.

There's the word Maga (cf. Magi) which connotes "Great Cause; Brotherhood; Gift" and is akin to the Sanskrit maha.

Will you please stop with this mah-gah rubbish? Your source was a 15th century book that tries to pretend that everything in the world is Persian; the author of that book was notably ignorant, didn't even know that Medina is Arabic for "[political] state" and was explicitly named that by Muhammad because that is where he first took political control-- such a central event in Islamic history that one would have expected any Muslim to have heard about it.

Well before I do would the word mah "moon" and "gah" not have developed into these forms by the time of the Sassanians? And secondly the affix -dina in Medina "[political] state" sounds was derived from the Aryan form daena "law; faith; religion."

 

[bob x]

That's what wikipedia says. Ashur

Yes, I read that. I was expressing surprise that a king of that city was mentioned as early as 21st century BC (that is, just before 2000) which is centuries before I thought. It means that if the Indo-European etymology is correct (and the Wiki article notes that the Assyrians themselves don't seem to have known where the name came from: late cuneiform tries writing it as an.sar. "host of heaven" which is obviously a "folk etymology", that is, somebody making up a source for a mysterious name), then this does indeed make a case for earlier Indo-European presence than I had been thinking.

Well I got another question for ya BX: the velar fricative is quite frequent in the Aryan languages

Why can't you use the word "Iranian"? The pronounciation "Aryan" was ousted by "Iran" thousands of years ago in the modern Iranian languages, and you are evidently not meaning anything ancient like "Proto-Indo-Iranian" when you say "Aryan".

Velar fricatives in modern Iranian are either variants of the aspirated stop (khor "to eat" was originally "k" plus "h" like English core where we tack on an aspiration to any voiceless stop in initial position, without noticing) or a thickening of "h" (xor "sun" from Avestan hwar). The sound was not one of the original phonemes.

but what about other Indo-European languages, the Indic languages in particular

Sanskrit had the fourfold opposition among the stops, k/kh/g/gh (aspirated/unaspirated independently of voiceless/voiced), with no fricatives; I don't know how often they erode to fricatives in modern Indic languages.
In Balto-Slavic, the velar fricative is middling-common, apparently as an alternate fate for original "g" under the S'atam shift: usually "g" like "k" went to a sibilant, compare English know (in which the "k" was once pronounced as in German kennen), Greek gnosis with Sanskrit jnana, Russian znat' but, Russian xodyit' appears to be cognate with English go.
In Modern Greek it arises as a variant pronunciation from the aspirated stop chi in the Ancient Greek; it wasn't an original phoneme in the Balkan Peripheral (Armenian has it from some foreign borrowings and some peculiar shifts) anymore than in Proto-S'atam.
Germanic had it commonly, as a shift from a stop following a vowel, particularly in compounds: English night once pronounced the "gh" as in German Nacht, compare Latin noct, Greek nuks. Centum languages (Celtic, Romance) never had that sound. It is certainly not Proto-Indo-European.

and also the Afro-Asiatic languages like Assyrian?

In Hebrew, stops and fricatives are hardly distinguished at all. A stop after a vowel regularly weakens to a fricative: bet "house" is generally beth ("th" as in English with) in Sephardic dialect or bes in Ashkenazic; then ha-bet "the house" becomes haveth (because ha "the" is treated more like a prefix than like a separate word; so its vowel erodes the following stop). We do not know the pronunciation of Assyrian very well, because of the sad lack of tape recorders in ancient times, and the cuneiform system used syllable-signs so that a lot of subtle distinctions were lost for lack of a complete set of syllables; there are no cuneiform marks which specifically indicate any use of fricatives but the situation may have been like in Hebrew (ne.bo. "god of prophecy" might have been pronounced nevo like Hebrew nabiy pronounced naviy "prophet"). The velar series was not an exception to the pattern: compare k- "like" (a prefix), ken "thus; yes", kiy "because" but ekha (with the fricative) "how?"

Ok, but are you saying that there's no association with the Hebrew yareah and the moon?

No, I'm saying it's an ancient poetic way of saying "moon"; and that your author has zero understanding of either ancient or poetic ways of thought. Consider the sentence "inanimate hunks of orbiting rock aren't the kinds of things you generally converse with": nobody prior to the invention of the telescope would have guessed that the moon was made of rock; and as long as the nature of the moon was mysterious, people wouldn't have tended to assume it was "inanimate" either; Wright is back-projecting a modern-only viewpoint of dead matter operating by mechanistic scientific laws on to ancient people who would never have thought in those terms. And, he is interpreting a poet who says he is "talking to the moon": I immediately think of the 60's song "I Talk to the Trees" where the poet is obviously speaking of a walk in the woods, talking to himself; but Wright has no poet in him and is thinking in dead-literal terms.

All the more reason for a people to have deified the moon somewhere along the lines, right?

That doesn't mean it has to have been a particularly important deity, or that any reference to the moon has to be a reference to a deity. In Greek, Helios "the sun" and Selene "the moon" are personified in some legends, but there were no temples or cults devoted to either of them; they were quite peripheral to the religion, and generally a usage of either word is just the normal way of saying "sun" or "moon".

That has got to be a lie. First off the Achaemenids frontiers reached as west as the Danube, Macedon, and Ethiopia. Arabia lies between the Aryan zone, and the Danube, Macedon, and Ethiopia.

Your geography is very poor. Anatolia (modern Turkey) is what is on the way from Iran to Macedon and the Danube valley. Palestine and Egypt are what they went through on the way to Ethiopia. Here is a map for you.

The Cyropedia specifically mentions the Arabs as one of the conquered people's under Cyrus the Great's rule.

Arabic became the major language in Transjordan (Nehemiah 6:1 mentions "Geshem the Arab" as one of the leaders there) and parts of Iraq long before the Muslim conquest (due to the depopulations during the wars). The Persians certainly did have Arab-speaking subjects; they just did not control any part of the peninsula, and certainly were nowhere near Mecca.

No, but the Aryan language does contain the word Raspi which is an official of the priestly cast in Zoroastrianism. I'm not sure about the exact root of the word

According to this, the priest is the zoatar (from atar "sacred fire" which we have discussed before), while the raspi is the non-priestly layman "assistant" from the Avestan root rach "to help" (perhaps like English reach?). A root referring to an "underling" is seriously unlikely to be related to a word for one's "superior".

similar to how the [v] in the Heb. Ivri "travel" or [p] in the Heb. hapar "spy" hardened to a hard to become to word Hebrew in the Hebrew language. Or maybe it was Heparu originally a [p]

In Hebrew "v" and "b" have never been distinguished: ibrit "Hebrew" is generally pronounced ivrith and apparently always has been. The root with "b/v" is "to cross over" hence the noun-forms mean things like "traveller; nomad; merchant"; the root with a "p" instead occurs in Egyptian with the sense apparently of "rebel; renegade" like that Hebrew form for "spy", and may well be just a variant of the same root. Note a similar shift between "v/b" and "p" in the Indo-European forms of the root (here, a very ancient root not borrowed from Semitic but rather tracing back to the "Nostratic" common ancestor of Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European): English over, German u:ber, Greek huper, Latin super.

There's the word Maga (cf. Magi) which connotes "Great Cause; Brotherhood; Gift" and is akin to the Sanskrit maha.

I don't know any association of Mag with any words for "cause" or "brother" or "gift"; I noted that it has been compared with maha but that the shift of "h" to "g" is mysterious. We do not find anything to indicate that the "h" in Sanskrit represents an older "g" in Proto-Indo-European (see Latin maius), or any other examples where "h" in Indo-Iranian turns into "g" in Avestan.

Well before I do would the word mah "moon" and "gah" not have developed into these forms by the time of the Sassanians?

The Sassanians are centuries later than Ptolemy, who already has the form Makoraba for the place-name.

And secondly the affix -dina in Medina "[political] state" sounds was derived from the Aryan form daena "law; faith; religion."

In Medina, the -dina is the ROOT "to judge; to make decisions". The m- is the affix, participial making "that which makes decisions [the political structure, that is]; state". The root is native to Semitic; the borrowing is FROM the Mideast TO Iran, again, since no words related to daena occur in other branches of Indo-European, there is no reason to think it anciently belongs to the language.

 

[mojobadshah]

Yes, I read that. I was expressing surprise that a king of that city was mentioned as early as 21st century BC (that is, just before 2000) which is centuries before I thought. It means that if the Indo-European etymology is correct (and the Wiki article notes that the Assyrians themselves don't seem to have known where the name came from: late cuneiform tries writing it as an.sar. "host of heaven" which is obviously a "folk etymology", that is, somebody making up a source for a mysterious name), then this does indeed make a case for earlier Indo-European presence than I had been thinking.

So an.sar can not be the source of the form Ashura because it's not likely that [sh] developed into (n. isn't a nasal velar right)? Also do you think the form Ashan could be related to this form an.sar?

Why can't you use the word "Iranian"? The pronounciation "Aryan" was ousted by "Iran" thousands of years ago in the modern Iranian languages, and you are evidently not meaning anything ancient like "Proto-Indo-Iranian" when you say "Aryan".

I refuse to use the term Iranian to designate the languages in question. First off it's very confusing to the layman. Everytime I use it people think I'm talking soley about the language of modern day Iran. Aryan makes way more sense to use because pretty much all the members of the language family in question used form of the word Aryan to designate themselves. Thirdly I think that the linguist's and historian's decision not to use the term Aryan to designate this language family has been extremely unwise, and deceptive in nature, whether it has been intentional or not. That the Indo-European people have a common linguistic heritage is undeniable, but by omitting the usage of the term "Aryan" in reference to the language family in question they have given rise to a serious confusion of a totally legitimate national ancestry and linguistic identity with the Nazi conception of the Aryan among laymen. The implications of using the term Aryan in the original sense of the word to designate the language family which includes the Afghans, Iranians, Tajiks, Kurds, etc... are too grave.

Velar fricatives in modern Iranian are either variants of the aspirated stop (khor "to eat" was originally "k" plus "h" like English core where we tack on an aspiration to any voiceless stop in initial position, without noticing) or a thickening of "h" (xor "sun" from Avestan hwar). The sound was not one of the original phonemes.

Sanskrit had the fourfold opposition among the stops, k/kh/g/gh (aspirated/unaspirated independently of voiceless/voiced), with no fricatives;

We do not know the pronunciation of Assyrian very well, because of the sad lack of tape recorders in ancient times, and the cuneiform system used syllable-signs so that a lot of subtle distinctions were lost for lack of a complete set of syllables; there are no cuneiform marks which specifically indicate any use of fricatives but the situation may have been like in Hebrew (ne.bo. "god of prophecy" might have been pronounced nevo like Hebrew nabiy pronounced naviy "prophet"). The velar series was not an exception to the pattern: compare k- "like" (a prefix), ken "thus; yes", kiy "because" but ekha (with the fricative) "how?"

So it's possible that Assyrian contained velar fricatives because Hebrew shows signs of velar fricatives and they're both Canaanite languages, but considering that later Aryan languages contained velar fricatives and its sister Indic doesn't that maybe Assyrian didn't either. What is interesting to me is that later Aryan languages did contain velar fricatives which developed out of aspirates. So what happens to velar fricatives that enter into populations that don't generally contain velar fricatives?

No, I'm saying it's an ancient poetic way of saying "moon"; and that your author has zero understanding of either ancient or poetic ways of thought. Consider the sentence "inanimate hunks of orbiting rock aren't the kinds of things you generally converse with": nobody prior to the invention of the telescope would have guessed that the moon was made of rock; and as long as the nature of the moon was mysterious, people wouldn't have tended to assume it was "inanimate" either; Wright is back-projecting a modern-only viewpoint of dead matter operating by mechanistic scientific laws on to ancient people who would never have thought in those terms. And, he is interpreting a poet who says he is "talking to the moon": I immediately think of the 60's song "I Talk to the Trees" where the poet is obviously speaking of a walk in the woods, talking to himself; but Wright has no poet in him and is thinking in dead-literal terms.

That doesn't mean it has to have been a particularly important deity, or that any reference to the moon has to be a reference to a deity. In Greek, Helios "the sun" and Selene "the moon" are personified in some legends, but there were no temples or cults devoted to either of them; they were quite peripheral to the religion, and generally a usage of either word is just the normal way of saying "sun" or "moon".

Back-projecting... I hear that. Nevertheless there is a semantic connection with the Hebrew yareah and the moon, and I would assume that the fact that most ancient culture's year including that of the Hebrews employed lunar calendars would have something to do with this relationship, no? And I find it interesting that the Old Aryan form Yarah means "year" and the Aryans employed lunar calendars too. I've been reading more of Rober Wright too it's his contention that the Zoroastrian Empire of the Persians had a lot of influence on the shaping of even the sections that are considered to be archaic. So maybe Yahweh-Yireh was a loan from the Zoroastrians after all. It brings to mind the idea of a Zoroastrian month dedicated to the creator Dadvah Mah. Ugartic texts where a similar form appears were attested as early as 1400 B.C. which places them around the same time as the West Aryan texts of the Mittani.

Your geography is very poor. Anatolia (modern Turkey) is what is on the way from Iran to Macedon and the Danube valley. Palestine and Egypt are what they went through on the way to Ethiopia. Here is a map for you.

Arabic became the major language in Transjordan (Nehemiah 6:1 mentions "Geshem the Arab" as one of the leaders there) and parts of Iraq long before the Muslim conquest (due to the depopulations during the wars). The Persians certainly did have Arab-speaking subjects; they just did not control any part of the peninsula, and certainly were nowhere near Mecca.

Hey, Arabia is between Iran and Macedon, its just south. And how could the Persians have had Arab-speaking subjects and not have controlled the peninsula? The weren't just Arab speaking subjects. The one mentioned in the Cyropedia was the king of Arabia.

You're map by the way resolved to nothing, but you know how I'm very skeptical BX. Most of the Maps I've seen of the Persian Empire don't even include either India or Ethiopia, which tends to make Persia look a lot smaller than it was, when in reality it was larger than both the Greek and the Roman Empires in size, and larger proportionally to the British Empire.

According to this, the priest is the zoatar (from atar "sacred fire" which we have discussed before), while the raspi is the non-priestly layman "assistant" from the Avestan root rach "to help" (perhaps like English reach?). A root referring to an "underling" is seriously unlikely to be related to a word for one's "superior".

Yeah, but Rab-Mag was a title given to non-Persian priestly officials so in a way it does equate to the raspi of the Zoroastrian priesthood.

In Hebrew "v" and "b" have never been distinguished: ibrit "Hebrew" is generally pronounced ivrith and apparently always has been. The root with "b/v" is "to cross over" hence the noun-forms mean things like "traveller; nomad; merchant"; the root with a "p" instead occurs in Egyptian with the sense apparently of "rebel; renegade" like that Hebrew form for "spy", and may well be just a variant of the same root. Note a similar shift between "v/b" and "p" in the Indo-European forms of the root (here, a very ancient root not borrowed from Semitic but rather tracing back to the "Nostratic" common ancestor of Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European): English over, German u:ber, Greek huper, Latin super.

So there are are no [p] to shifts in the Canaanite languages?

I don't know any association of Mag with any words for "cause" or "brother" or "gift."

I have. "message" too. But " 'Great' Cause" is what's of some significance here.

The Sassanians are centuries later than Ptolemy, who already has the form Makoraba for the place-name.

Yes, well my point was that Makkah was a folk change to dumb down the slaughter of the Mag-Rabba when Mohammad took over.

In Medina, the -dina is the ROOT "to judge; to make decisions". The m- is the affix, participial making "that which makes decisions [the political structure, that is]; state". The root is native to Semitic; the borrowing is FROM the Mideast TO Iran, again, since no words related to daena occur in other branches of Indo-European, there is no reason to think it anciently belongs to the language.

Maybe my knowledge on this phenomenon is dated, but I take it you don't agree with the postulations that link the Avestan Daena with the Greek Danae, the Don, Dniester, Dneiper, and Danube rivers, the Celtic Tuatha Dedanann ,
the Germanic Danes, etc...

 

[bob x]

So an.sar can not be the source of the form Ashura because it's not likely that [sh] developed into (n. isn't a nasal velar right)?

The dots were just to mark the syllable characters: the syllable an. was written with the same "star" cuneiform symbol that was also used to write the word for "god" (whether pronounced dingir in Sumerian or ilu in Akkadian) or as a "determiner" preceding the name of a god ("determiners" helped resolve ambiguity by telling you what kind of word followed: a stick preceded the name of a man; a criss-cross the name of a woman; the "mountain" character the name of a place; "wood" or "metal" the name of an object made of those substances etc.) The velar nasal written "ng" in English was disfavored in the Semitic languages: the original alphabetic script contained a letter nung "fish" for it, as opposed to nachash "snake" for the plain "n" (dental nasal), but in the Hebrew alphabet it is called nun and took over for nachash as the plain "n"; words which used to contain "ng" shifted to "n" or "m" as in (Tukult)-Ningrut "the fisherman", founder of Nineveh, spelled Tu.kul.ti.ni.nur.tu. in Assyrian cuneiform or Nimrod in Hebrew.

Also do you think the form Ashan could be related to this form an.sar?

It was an Elamite city long before the Persians came; the first element could be a borrowing from Sumerian an "heaven" but the second element is not sar (indeed a shift "s" to "sh" would be unlikely, as would "r" to "n"), probably some Elamite word that I don't know.

I refuse to use the term Iranian to designate the languages in question. First off it's very confusing to the layman.

To a layman, the term "Aryan" implies that you are talking about the Nazi ideal super-race. It is unfair that those crazy Germans have permanently caused such confusion (it is equally unfair that nobody can look at a swastika without thinking about the Third Reich rather than about Tibetans or Navajos, but so it is), but it's just the fact Jack.

Everytime I use it people think I'm talking soley about the language of modern day Iran.

See, I thought you WERE just talking solely about the modern Iranian languages-- because you were saying that velar fricatives were common in the group you meant, which is only true about the modern Iranians; the sound didn't exist in Gathic Avestan or Vedic Sanskrit or Proto-Indo-Iranian.

Aryan makes way more sense to use because pretty much all the members of the language family in question used form of the word Aryan to designate themselves.

The "form" of the word "Aryan" that is used by the Iranians is "Iran" so that is what has become the standard usage, if referring only to that modern group. If we want to refer to the more ancient language group, in which "Indic" and "Iranian" were not yet sharply distinguished because both were still similar to the common ancestor, the standard form is "Indo-Iranian". You may wish that "Aryan" had remained the standard usage, but it just hasn't; and when you use non-standard terms, your chance of being misunderstood increases. We might compare the hyphenated term "Eskimo-Aleut": the "Eskimoes" don't actually call themselves that, and don't like the term in fact; there have been attempts to make "Innuitic" (from their own word for themselves) but it just hasn't caught on (and would be a little confusing because the "Aleut" actually pronounce it more like "Illiut" so there is no way to avoid favoring one subgroup over the other).

That the Indo-European people have a common linguistic heritage is undeniable

"Indo-European" refers to a much wider group than just the "Indo-Iranians". The old usage by racial theorists of "Aryan" to cover Germans, Latins, all kinds of people who were Indo-European but not Indo-Iranian, and never used any form of "Aryan" as a self-name, is a poisonous confusion.

but by omitting the usage of the term "Aryan" in reference to the language family in question they have given rise to a serious confusion of a totally legitimate national ancestry and linguistic identity with the Nazi conception of the Aryan among laymen.

The serious confusion happened because many more laymen have heard about World War Two than have heard about linguistics. I'm sorry, it's too late to undo that; just accept it.

So it's possible that Assyrian contained velar fricatives because Hebrew shows signs of velar fricatives and they're both Canaanite languages

They're both SEMITIC languages; but the Canaanite subgroup (to which Hebrew belongs) is in the Central Semitic branch (along with Arabian and Aramaic languages) while the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian languages are the East Semitic branch.

but considering that later Aryan languages contained velar fricatives and its sister Indic doesn't that maybe Assyrian didn't either.

Iranian languages acquiring velar fricatives in medieval times is an irrelevancy as to whether the unrelated and earlier Assyrian language did or didn't have them. As to whether recent Indic languages have acquired them, I said I don't know to what extent, if any, they have; I could look it up.

So what happens to velar fricatives that enter into populations that don't generally contain velar fricatives?

They can either disappear, reduce to "h", or strengten to stops.

Nevertheless there is a semantic connection with the Hebrew yareah and the moon, and I would assume that the fact that most ancient culture's year including that of the Hebrews employed lunar calendars would have something to do with this relationship, no?

The semantic relation is to the verb "to see"; it is a name for the moon as the thing making night-vision possible, not as a time-keeper. However:

And I find it interesting that the Old Aryan form Yarah means "year" and the Aryans employed lunar calendars too.

This yarah is from a Proto-Indo-European root: compare English year, Greek hora "season; timespan" (hence English hour). It may go back to Nostratic root for "light" seen in such Semitic forms as Hebrew uwr "light", m-owr "light-bringer" (participial m- again; at Genesis 1:15-16 the sun and moon are the two m-oroth). In Semitic the w-r forms for "light" are connected to the y-r forms for "see" ("w" and "y" often interchange), although Indo-European lacks, as far as I know, any words for "see" that belong to this root.

I've been reading more of Rober Wright too it's his contention that the Zoroastrian Empire of the Persians had a lot of influence on the shaping of even the sections that are considered to be archaic.

He doesn't know what he is talking about, linguistically speaking.

It brings to mind the idea of a Zoroastrian month dedicated to the creator Dadvah Mah. Ugartic texts where a similar form appears were attested as early as 1400 B.C.

An Ugaritic form similar to "Dadvah Mah"??? Show me.

Hey, Arabia is between Iran and Macedon, its just south.

That's like saying Alabama is "between" Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

And how could the Persians have had Arab-speaking subjects and not have controlled the peninsula?

Because, as I explained to you, Arab-speakers had expanded outside of the peninsula.

The one mentioned in the Cyropedia was the king of Arabia.

Not of the peninsula, which remained fractured into petty kingdoms and sheikdoms until Muhammad (the very first person to control all of the peninsula). The kingdom referred to is the well-known "Arabia Petraea" or "Nabatea", tributary to the Achaemenids and then to the Seleucids and Romans, until reduced to a Roman province; it was in modern Jordan.

You're map by the way resolved to nothing

Sorry, the link worked for me. Here is a better link to the same map, larger.

Most of the Maps I've seen of the Persian Empire don't even include either India or Ethiopia

For the very excellent reason that the Persian Empire didn't include India or Ethiopia. The Persians did conquer the Indus valley from Indian principalities, and some of the Nile cataracts from the Ethiopians; that is as far as they got; the map I show you is the maximum that Persia ever held.

Yeah, but Rab-Mag was a title given to non-Persian priestly officials so in a way it does equate to the raspi of the Zoroastrian priesthood.

The raspi WERE NOT priests, and WERE Persian. The mag-rab (not "Rab-Mag") WERE NOT Persians, and WERE priests. Furthermore, as I pointed out, the "s" in raspi is a medieval erosion: the Avestan pronunciation was with a "c" (unaspirated affricate like English "ch" at the end of church, as opposed to the aspirated "ch" at the beginning). And the -pi is a grammatical affix, not part of the root, so it doesn't belong in your comparison.

So there are are no [p] to shifts in the Canaanite languages?

Maybe there were, is what I was saying; you seem to have taken me to be saying the opposite.

I have. "message" too. But " 'Great' Cause" is what's of some significance here.

If you have seen any connection of mag to any word for "cause" or "brother" or "message" or whatever, then show it to me. The connection to words for "great" has this problem that there is no "g" in any of the other Indo-European words for "great", so how you do propose that it got there?

Yes, well my point was that Makkah was a folk change to dumb down the slaughter of the Mag-Rabba when Mohammad took over.

Here I don't even understand what you're saying anymore. What exactly do you think the original name looked like and how did it get to where it is now?

Maybe my knowledge on this phenomenon is dated, but I take it you don't agree with the postulations that link the Avestan Daena with the Greek Danae, the Don, Dniester, Dneiper, and Danube rivers, the Celtic Tuatha Dedanann ,
the Germanic Danes, etc...

That's a word for "river" also giving various river-goddesses or peoples living by a river. There is no connection to the verb "to judge or make decisions" in the Semitic languages. You were telling me Avestan had a word daena "law; religion" which would not seem related to the "river" root (occurring independently in Avestan); and I don't see any Indo-European cognates. Here is a link to a review of a general textbook on Indo-European, where the reviewer notes several points he thinks dubious: one is the author's attempt to find some Indo-European cognate for Avestan daena, but the reviewer says "Lithuanian duona means 'bread' not 'gift'". A borrowing from Semitic seems a much more straightforward explanation than hunting for words that actually mean "river" or "bread" and only have the "d" and "n" consonants in common.

 

[mojobadshah]

To a layman, the term "Aryan" implies that you are talking about the Nazi ideal super-race. It is unfair that those crazy Germans have permanently caused such confusion (it is equally unfair that nobody can look at a swastika without thinking about the Third Reich rather than about Tibetans or Navajos, but so it is), but it's just the fact Jack.

Listen BX, I keep on telling ya, the reason that people associate the word Aryan with the Germans and not the Aryans is because of the history textbooks. People aren't born thinking the Germans are the Aryans. Students are indoctrinated with this bs from an early age, with no exposure to the true origin of the term, nor it's implications. It's pure propaganda.

The "form" of the word "Aryan" that is used by the Iranians is "Iran" so that is what has become the standard usage, if referring only to that modern group. If we want to refer to the more ancient language group, in which "Indic" and "Iranian" were not yet sharply distinguished because both were still similar to the common ancestor, the standard form is "Indo-Iranian". You may wish that "Aryan" had remained the standard usage, but it just hasn't; and when you use non-standard terms, your chance of being misunderstood increases.

"Indo-European" refers to a much wider group than just the "Indo-Iranians". The old usage by racial theorists of "Aryan" to cover Germans, Latins, all kinds of people who were Indo-European but not Indo-Iranian, and never used any form of "Aryan" as a self-name, is a poisonous confusion.

The serious confusion happened because many more laymen have heard about World War Two than have heard about linguistics. I'm sorry, it's too late to undo that; just accept it.

Ain't happenin. Like I said it's because of the textbooks. The British and Americans, who as a matter of fact were neutral states before pearl harbor, bought into the Nazi concept of the Aryan and just couldn't let go of it. The people who write the textbooks prefer to deceive their students then expose them to the truth. The only people who called themselves Aryans verbatim were the people of Greater Khorashan including the ancient Iranians, Tajiks, and Afghans, but even the Iron of Georgia, Aryan speakers, used a similar national self-designation. No other Indo-European did. I see right through the people behind those history classes.

They can either disappear, reduce to "h", or strengten to stops.

How hard of a stop can they strengthen too [g]? And is it possible that after that they soften to a [sh] sound? Can a velar fricative shift to a [sh] sound?

The semantic relation is to the verb "to see"; it is a name for the moon as the thing making night-vision possible, not as a time-keeper. However:

This yarah is from a Proto-Indo-European root: compare English year, Greek hora "season; timespan" (hence English hour). It may go back to Nostratic root for "light" seen in such Semitic forms as Hebrew uwr "light", m-owr "light-bringer" (participial m- again; at Genesis 1:15-16 the sun and moon are the two m-oroth). In Semitic the w-r forms for "light" are connected to the y-r forms for "see" ("w" and "y" often interchange), although Indo-European lacks, as far as I know, any words for "see" that belong to this root.

I recall seeing in the OED that Iranians thought there was a man on the moon though.

He doesn't know what he is talking about, linguistically speaking.

Well I looked into Deuteronomy and apparently that chapters 1-4 were a redaction is not a new information. Do those people not know what they're talking about linguistically either?

An Ugaritic form similar to "Dadvah Mah"??? Show me.

No similar form. Similar concept.

The kingdom referred to is the well-known "Arabia Petraea" or "Nabatea", tributary to the Achaemenids and then to the Seleucids and Romans, until reduced to a Roman province; it was in modern Jordan.

Equates to ruled over Arabia to me...

For the very excellent reason that the Persian Empire didn't include India or Ethiopia. The Persians did conquer the Indus valley from Indian principalities, and some of the Nile cataracts from the Ethiopians; that is as far as they got; the map I show you is the maximum that Persia ever held.

Once again. Then why does the Cyropedia mention the Indian king subjecting himself to Cyrus's rule. Why do Achemenid inscriptions mention the Ethiopia as a subject nation, and even depicts the Ethiopians presenting offerings to Darious. And why does the Old Testament describe how Xerxes ruled from India to Ethiopia. I think what we have is a case of little shortchanging here.

The raspi WERE NOT priests, and WERE Persian. The mag-rab (not "Rab-Mag") WERE NOT Persians, and WERE priests. Furthermore, as I pointed out, the "s" in raspi is a medieval erosion: the Avestan pronunciation was with a "c" (unaspirated affricate like English "ch" at the end of church, as opposed to the aspirated "ch" at the beginning). And the -pi is a grammatical affix, not part of the root, so it doesn't belong in your comparison.

What out of curiosity is the archaic form of the word raspi?

If you have seen any connection of mag to any word for "cause" or "brother" or "message" or whatever, then show it to me. The connection to words for "great" has this problem that there is no "g" in any of the other Indo-European words for "great", so how you do propose that it got there?

That which Zoroaster would forward upon the earth the spread of the religion of beneficence and spiritual worship, is called in the Persian scriptures the Maga or Great Cause; the reward for helping it on was Paradise or Heaven, the "Abode of Song," into which God enters first; as it is put in the Gathas (see Yasna 51:15) - Miles Menander Dawson, The Ethical Religion of Zoroaster pg. 11

Here I don't even understand what you're saying anymore. What exactly do you think the original name looked like and how did it get to where it is now?

I think what you were saying was the Hebrew form Maga-Rabba may actually have been the original form and I think we agree it may be akin to the latter rab-mag which I believe has something to do with the Zoroastrian Magi, but it was folkchanged to Ma-gah "moon place/worship" to cover-up that that was formerly a Magi center, and Magah developed into Makkah.

That's a word for "river" also giving various river-goddesses or peoples living by a river. There is no connection to the verb "to judge or make decisions" in the Semitic languages. You were telling me Avestan had a word daena "law; religion" which would not seem related to the "river" root (occurring independently in Avestan); and I don't see any Indo-European cognates. Here is a link to a review of a general textbook on Indo-European, where the reviewer notes several points he thinks dubious: one is the author's attempt to find some Indo-European cognate for Avestan daena, but the reviewer says "Lithuanian duona means 'bread' not 'gift'". A borrowing from Semitic seems a much more straightforward explanation than hunting for words that actually mean "river" or "bread" and only have the "d" and "n" consonants in common.

However Daena in the Avesta was the goddess that awaited the soul of the one whose good deeds outweighed their bad deeds, so I do see a connection to "law; faith; religion; policy"

 

[bob x]

the reason that people associate the word Aryan with the Germans and not the Aryans is because of the history textbooks.

And the reason it's in the textbooks is because it's in the history. It is of course very important that students are taught about the major slaughter of the previous century; more so than that they be taught about ancient linguistics from thousands of years ago. I was taught that the Germans were actually mis-appropriating and mis-using the word "Aryan"; but the association is always going to be to the German mis-usage first and foremost, until some future time when no-one who lived through WWII is still around and it has faded in historical memory.

The British and Americans, who as a matter of fact were neutral states before pearl harbor...

Uh... the British had been fighting Germany for over two years before Pearl Harbor, and had suffered heavy bombardment of London; the Americans had been shipping them weapons. You are complaining about textbooks teaching kids about WWII, and you yourself don't actually know anything about the whole course of the war?

... bought into the Nazi concept of the Aryan and just couldn't let go of it.

Uh... the Germans were our ENEMIES, remember?

The only people who called themselves Aryans verbatim were the people of Greater Khorashan including the ancient Iranians, Tajiks, and Afghans

The form aryan was also used by the Indics; the Iranians shifted it to forms like iran rather early. Why you are insisting on an archaic form which your own people abandoned thousands of years ago, and which has been recently been so mis-used that people don't immediately understand what you are even saying, is a total mystery here.

but even the Iron of Georgia, Aryan speakers, used a similar national self-designation.

It is much closer to "Iranian" obviously.

No other Indo-European did.

That was my point. At some points you have seemed to be wanting the term "Aryan" to apply to non-Indo-Iranian Indo-Europeans, which is a distortion.

Can a velar fricative shift to a [sh] sound?

This happens in the Prussian dialect of German, where ich sounds like "eesh".

Well I looked into Deuteronomy and apparently that chapters 1-4 were a redaction is not a new information. Do those people not know what they're talking about linguistically either?

You were claiming that seriously archaic chapters like the Abraham narrative in Genesis were late. If your source is telling you that, then it's wrong.

No similar form. Similar concept.

The concept of naming months for deities is far older than the existence of Iranian peoples. That is practically a Pan-Human concept.

Equates to ruled over Arabia to me...

The distance from Petra to Mecca is longer than the distance from Detroit to Atlanta. The governor of Michigan does not "equate" to the governor of Georgia. This is not the first time that you have failed to understand how very far away places can be from each other.

Then why does the Cyropedia mention the Indian king subjecting himself to Cyrus's rule.

There was not a unified king of all India anymore than there was of all Arabia. The whole Indus valley was captured, yes, as the map shows.

Why do Achemenid inscriptions mention the Ethiopia as a subject nation, and even depicts the Ethiopians presenting offerings to Darious.

The map that I showed you IS what Darius describes as his borders. It included a small sliver of Ethiopia, as it included a larger sliver of India, and the Arab speakers of Jordan.

I think what we have is a case of little shortchanging here.

Quite the reverse. You want to imagine that the Persians owned all of India, all the way to Bangladesh, and all of Ethiopia, all the way to Somalia, because it always suits your purposes to exaggerate.

What out of curiosity is the archaic form of the word raspi?

I don't believe there is one. It is a medieval word. The root was archaically rac rather than ras; the -pi is a suffix.

That which Zoroaster would forward upon the earth the spread of the religion of beneficence and spiritual worship, is called in the Persian scriptures the Maga or Great Cause; the reward for helping it on was Paradise or Heaven, the "Abode of Song," into which God enters first; as it is put in the Gathas (see Yasna 51:15) - Miles Menander Dawson, The Ethical Religion of Zoroaster pg. 11

But why is he translating maga as "great cause"? It sounds much more like he is guessing at a translation for a mysterious word than like he actually knows of any earlier word for "cause" that he is deriving it from.

I think what you were saying was the Hebrew form Maga-Rabba may actually have been the original form

There never existed any Hebrew form such as "Maga-Rabba": there is Ptolemy's Greek rendering Makoraba, easily understood as the Semitic participial prefix m- on the root k-r-b "to keep time"; the Sabaean (Yemeni) form m-k-r-b (vowels uncertain) "high priest"; and the Arabic forms al-Mukarimah "the magnificent" and Makka Rabba "Mecca the great", easily understood as re-parsings of Makoraba after the k-r-b root fell into disuse. At no point has the name ever been spelled with a "g" because Arabic does not even have that sound (old Semitic words with "g" and even foreign borrowings containing that sound are regularly shifted to "j", as Latin genii "spirits" becomes Arabic jinni).

and I think we agree it may be akin to the latter rab-mag

There is no form rab-mag in any language; the title was Mag Rab (Semitic languages use the order noun-adjective, not adjective-noun).

but it was folkchanged to Ma-gah "moon place/worship"

The form mah gah occurs nowhere except in a 15th-century Persian book written by an author of astounding ignorance.

Look, there's nothing easier than grabbing words from different languages that have a bunch of letters in common. How about the name Leningrad that was used for St. Petersburg from the 20's to the 80's: should I propose that it is derived from English linen grad because there is a university, and graduates dress in academic robes-- made of linen, get it? That would be silly, when Leningrad has a very straightforward etymology within Russian, "Lenin's city", and we actually know exactly when the name was changed (after Lenin's death), and by whom (his successor Stalin), and what he meant by it (dedicating the city to a Communist rather than Christian hero). Similarly, we know exactly what Medinah means in Arabic ("state"), and when the name was changed (it was Yathrib until Muhammad took it over), and by whom (Muhammad), and what he meant by it (he wanted it to become the nucleus of an expanding Islamic state-- as, quite famously, it did). So you are relying on an author who has proposed something totally silly, as silly as "linen grad", in the case of Medinah, and you expect me to take what he says about Mecca seriously.

and Magah developed into Makkah.

It would have become Majah if the form had existed early.

However Daena in the Avesta was the goddess that awaited the soul of the one whose good deeds outweighed their bad deeds, so I do see a connection to "law; faith; religion; policy"

You were claiming a connection to a word for "river" which I don't see in the slightest. I don't have the text of Fortson's book, only the disagreements the reviewer was giving, but it looks like Fortson thought maybe there was a connection to the "give" root, which was exceedingly irregular in Proto-Indo-European so that it is hard to reconstruct, *daC/doC where "C" is an undetermined consonant: see Theo-doros "God-given; Theodore" from Greek but Bag-datta "God-given; Baghdad" from Persian, don-are "to give; donate" from Latin. I am guessing that Fortson was thinking, despite the thick -tt- in the Iranian "give" forms, maybe there were also some -n- forms, and as evidence he goes to Lithuanian (which sometimes shows preservations more reminiscent of Indo-Iranian than of Balto-Slavic) from which he remembered a word duona but, as sometimes happens, he mis-remembered what the word means; the reviewer points out that it is actually "bread" not "gift" (probably the root is like in English dine/dinner).

So, if we agree that the root-meaning is probably more like "law" than like "river" or "gift" or "dinner", then it is isolated within Indo-European. That is, it does not anciently belong to that language-group at all; it is a borrowing from the Semitic root d-y-n "to make decisions". You are constantly thinking that if there is a commonality between Iranian and something that pops up elsewhere in the Middle East, then Iran has to have been the source; but Iranians also borrowed a lot.

 

[mojobadshah]

And the reason it's in the textbooks is because it's in the history. It is of course very important that students are taught about the major slaughter of the previous century; more so than that they be taught about ancient linguistics from thousands of years ago. I was taught that the Germans were actually mis-appropriating and mis-using the word "Aryan"; but the association is always going to be to the German mis-usage first and foremost, until some future time when no-one who lived through WWII is still around and it has faded in historical memory.

No that is absolute bullsh!t. Yes, it's important that students know the Nazi's were psychopaths, but there is no reason they shouldn't be telling students who the real Aryans were and are. For all I know they want students to think that the real Aryans are blond haired blue eye'd types, racially superior, and actually existed, but the truth is the Aryans in the Nazi sense of the word never existed, the only people who used the term Aryan as a national self designation were the ancient Afghans, Iranians, Tajiks, etc...

Uh... the British had been fighting Germany for over two years before Pearl Harbor, and had suffered heavy bombardment of London; the Americans had been shipping them weapons. You are complaining about textbooks teaching kids about WWII, and you yourself don't actually know anything about the whole course of the war?

Yeah, that's what I meant, the British were neutral until the Germans attacked them, and the Americans were neutral until the Japanese attacked them.

Uh... the Germans were our ENEMIES, remember?

That doesn't mean they didn't buy into the Nazi conception of the Aryan. All that means is that they didn't buy into the Nazis. Like I said they weren't so innocent themselves, and they apparently are not today, and all you have to do to understand why is look at the textbooks. No reference to the Persians as Aryans or the original Aryans when WII is brought up. It has nothing to do with them wanting to forget. The way they have it worked out it works to their advantages in a two-fold discriminatory way. 1.) people end up thinking the blond haired blue eye'd types are the Aryans 2.) it suppresses real Aryan culture when the real Aryans come because now that they're teaching everyone about the racial conception of the Aryan the usage has become taboo. No other IE. language subfamily has that problem.

The form aryan was also used by the Indics; the Iranians shifted it to forms like iran rather early. Why you are insisting on an archaic form which your own people abandoned thousands of years ago, and which has been recently been so mis-used that people don't immediately understand what you are even saying, is a total mystery here.

How do you know they're my own people? In any case they have not abandoned the term. Ask any person of Aryan descent and they'll acknowledge that their ancestors were the Aryans. Why might I ask you do the school books insist on referring to the hypothetical ancestors of the Nazis as Aryan when they really called them Arisch and Arier? That the Indics used the form Aryan verbatim is new to me. I was aware they designated themselves Arya, but as far as using any form of the word as a national designation my understanding is that they never did.

It is much closer to "Iranian" obviously.

But if you read their mythology there are other forms as well.

That was my point. At some points you have seemed to be wanting the term "Aryan" to apply to non-Indo-Iranian Indo-Europeans, which is a distortion.

Yeah, but I was very specific about what I meant. At one point it was used to designate the languages of Indo-Europeans, after it came into use to designate the languages Afghans, Iranians etc... I think that it's a more poetic way of saying Indo-European, but it doesn't really help to distinguish between the real Aryans and the rest of the Indo-Europeans subfamilies. The thing that is important now is that people understand who the real Aryans were and are first.

This happens in the Prussian dialect of German, where ich sounds like "eesh".

Then let me get to my point. I realize problems are going to arise with this hypothesis, but focusing on this s>h shift which you have brought up so frequently to distinguish between the Indic and Aryan languages. Is it possible that the aspirate [h] in Ahura at some point (given that there is evidence of later velar fricatives in the Aryan language) developed into a velar fricative /x/ similar (similar to how Spanish people pronounce have xave) and from there developed into [sh] Ashura in one direction which was in contact with the Elamites who are akin to the Dravidic speakers because they did not contain velar fricatives, and /x/ developed into [sh]> Asura < Ashura in the other direction due to Dravidic presence because the Indic speakers don't contain velar fricatives either? Maybe Vedic inflections are closer to Young Avestan inflections because Vedic was actually an intermediate development of Old Avestan or a similar language.

You were claiming that seriously archaic chapters like the Abraham narrative in Genesis were late. If your source is telling you that, then it's wrong.

Well I think that even if that's the case it may have a lot to do with why the God in genesis is described as a monotheistic one, no?

Quite the reverse. You want to imagine that the Persians owned all of India, all the way to Bangladesh, and all of Ethiopia, all the way to Somalia, because it always suits your purposes to exaggerate.

Dude, I'm dealing with people that are writing the history books that are making the Aryans out to be themselves when the Afghans, Iranians, Tajiks, Kurds, are the real Aryans. EXCUSE ME.

But why is he translating maga as "great cause"? It sounds much more like he is guessing at a translation for a mysterious word than like he actually knows of any earlier word for "cause" that he is deriving it from.

I think it has something to do with later forms and definitions "message, gift, etc..." eg. magavan "bearer of the maga"

There never existed any Hebrew form such as "Maga-Rabba":

The Pentateuch and book of Joshua: critically examined, Volume 5

Sorry the Hebrew was Makkah-Rabbah

There is no form rab-mag in any language; the title was Mag Rab (Semitic languages use the order noun-adjective, not adjective-noun).

Right, well wasn't mag-rab one of the Aryan loans into Hebrew? Isn't it possible that it was originally something like Maga-Rabbah and because the Arabs don't have [g] they pronounced it Makkah-Rabbah and Mag-rab is a later development of Maga-Rabbah as well?

The form mah gah occurs nowhere except in a 15th-century Persian book written by an author of astounding ignorance.

It would have become Majah if the form had existed early.

Why wouldn't it have become Makah?

You were claiming a connection to a word for "river" which I don't see in the slightest. I don't have the text of Fortson's book, only the disagreements the reviewer was giving, but it looks like Fortson thought maybe there was a connection to the "give" root, which was exceedingly irregular in Proto-Indo-European so that it is hard to reconstruct, *daC/doC where "C" is an undetermined consonant: see Theo-doros "God-given; Theodore" from Greek but Bag-datta "God-given; Baghdad" from Persian, don-are "to give; donate" from Latin. I am guessing that Fortson was thinking, despite the thick -tt- in the Iranian "give" forms, maybe there were also some -n- forms, and as evidence he goes to Lithuanian (which sometimes shows preservations more reminiscent of Indo-Iranian than of Balto-Slavic) from which he remembered a word duona but, as sometimes happens, he mis-remembered what the word means; the reviewer points out that it is actually "bread" not "gift" (probably the root is like in English dine/dinner).

This Lithuanian form and dinner sound like they could be related to the droana liturgy of the Zoroastrians. For Daena > den see Daena - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So, if we agree that the root-meaning is probably more like "law" than like "river" or "gift" or "dinner", then it is isolated within Indo-European. That is, it does not anciently belong to that language-group at all; it is a borrowing from the Semitic root d-y-n "to make decisions". You are constantly thinking that if there is a commonality between Iranian and something that pops up elsewhere in the Middle East, then Iran has to have been the source; but Iranians also borrowed a lot.

That would mean there would have to have been a contact between the Semites and the Aryans when the Gathas were composed and you keep on implying that there was none. Or as you sometimes conclude that if the Iranian didn't come from the Semitic that they both came from Nostratic.

 

[bob x]

Yes, it's important that students know the Nazi's were psychopaths, but there is no reason they shouldn't be telling students who the real Aryans were and are. For all I know they want students to think that the real Aryans are blond haired blue eye'd types, racially superior, and actually existed

Well, *I* was taught, indeed, that the Nazis were crazy and that their notion of the "Aryan race" was a fiction, that "Aryan" was really just an old word for the Indo-Iranians, and so on. If you didn't get that, it appears to be more of a function of how little you paid attention in school than of what anybody tries to teach.

the only people who used the term Aryan as a national self designation were the ancient Afghans, Iranians, Tajiks, etc...

And the Indics; the branch that you are referring to abandoned the pronunciation "Aryan" in favor of "Iran" many thousands of years ago, which is why "Iranian" is the standard term; and the hyphenated "Indo-Iranian" has become the standard term for the older group from which both Indics and Iranians sprang, to avoid any confusion from the mis-appropriation of the "Aryan" name, which nobody is just going to be able to forget about, however much you wish they would.

Yeah, that's what I meant, the British were neutral until the Germans attacked them

Wrong. The British declared war when the Germans attacked POLAND; the German air attacks on British soil came later.

and the Americans were neutral until the Japanese attacked them.

Not very "neutral", no; we did not contribute troops but were supplying arms to the British side.

That doesn't mean they didn't buy into the Nazi conception of the Aryan.

Yeah, actually it does mean that. You are just being silly. You think that because it is necessary to teach that the Nazis had strange concepts, that anybody who even mentions that such strange concepts did exist must be endorsing their truth.

all you have to do to understand why is look at the textbooks. No reference to the Persians as Aryans or the original Aryans when WII is brought up.

You're just wrong. If you actually read the books, you find thorough discussion of where the word really came from, and how the 19th-20th century usages were misguided. There is nobody in academia who puts forth the view that the Nazis were right in their usage of "Aryan". You are arguing against imaginary people.

That the Indics used the form Aryan verbatim is new to me. I was aware they designated themselves Arya, but as far as using any form of the word as a national designation my understanding is that they never did.

You are mistaken. India is where the aryan pronunciation is still alive to this day; Iran is where iran became the pronunciation thousands of years ago. I would have thought this was common knowledge.

I realize problems are going to arise with this hypothesis, but focusing on this s>h shift which you have brought up so frequently to distinguish between the Indic and Aryan languages. Is it possible that the aspirate [h] in Ahura at some point (given that there is evidence of later velar fricatives in the Aryan language) developed into a velar fricative /x/ similar (similar to how Spanish people pronounce have xave) and from there developed into [sh] Ashura in one direction

No, it's not. The sibilant is what is found in EVERY OTHER INDO-EUROPEAN BRANCH except the Iranian subgroup of the Indo-Iranian (the German gods were Aesir not Aexir or anything like that; the root for "to be" which underlies the word is found as English is, Latin est etc. ) Therefore, the sibilant is the original sound, and the shift to "h" happened only within Iranian, at a fairly late date after Indo-Iranian had split up into sub-branches. There is not the slightest question here.

Well I think that even if that's the case it may have a lot to do with why the God in genesis is described as a monotheistic one, no?

It is because the Hebrews went through their own cultural development, to a monotheism which was purer than Zoroaster's (Ahura Mazda still has all these secondary divine manifestations and emanations etc.) quite independently of anything that was happening in Iran, at a time when the Hebrews did not yet have any contact with Iranians.

Dude, I'm dealing with people that are writing the history books that are making the Aryans out to be themselves

There are no such people, and there are no such books. Books do mention that the Nazis made out Aryans to be themselves, and make it plain that the Nazis were crazy and wrong.

I think it has something to do with later forms and definitions "message, gift, etc..." eg. magavan "bearer of the maga"

But where does anybody get the notion that "bearer of the maga" means "bearer of the message" or "bearer of the gift" etc? All we have is "bearer of the [whatever]" without any other word to compare maga to and tell us what the original meaning of that word might have been.

Sorry the Hebrew was Makkah-Rabbah

No. That just doesn't exist in Hebrew. You have cited this 19th-century author who claims that makkah in Hebrew means "slaughter"; but I don't find any such word. At Google Translate I find a bunch of roots associated to such meanings like sh-ch-t. "to slaughter animals for meat" (metaphorically used for great slaughters in battle), q-t.-l "to slay" (particularly murderously), z-b-ch and t.-b-ch (evidently variants of each other; I hadn't seen those before and don't know the precise connotations). I cannot find any usage of m-k-h in any such sense, and have no idea why Cortselo thought this; presumably, you know, the reason you never find this repeated in any source less than a hundred and fifty years old is that nobody else thinks it's right.

Right, well wasn't mag-rab one of the Aryan loans into Hebrew?

Certainly not rab which is a purely Semitic root, not occurring in any form in any Indo-European language whatsoever. As for mag, I keep telling you I just don't know the source.

Isn't it possible that it was originally something like Maga-Rabbah and because the Arabs don't have [g] they pronounced it Makkah-Rabbah and Mag-rab is a later development of Maga-Rabbah as well?
Why wouldn't it have become Makah?

It just DOESN'T shift that way in Arabic. You have this belief in purely random and arbitrary sound-shifts, that in THIS word such-and-such a sound shifts to THIS, but in THAT word the same sound shifts to THAT instead-- that's not what linguists find. Sound-shifts are systematic, and if you want to claim a sound-shift in a particular word, you justify by showing multiple, numerous of the same shift in other words. Does Latin frater look like English brother? Yes, but the similarity is not enough to justify saying they are cognate words: you justify by showing "f"/"b" correspondences in a lot of other words as well, Latin frag- (as in "fragile", "fragment") corresponding to break, flu- (as in "fluid", "flow") to blood etc.

In Arabic, "g" shifts to "j", all the time. Hebrew h-g-g "to go on a religious pilgrimage" is Arabic h-j-j (as in the hajj to Mecca), Hebrew h-g-r "to go into exile" is Arabic h-j-r (Muhammad's companions in the expulsion from Mecca to Yathrib, and the people booted from India to Pakistan, are called muhajirun) etc. Hypothetically, it could have been that Arabic shifted "g" to "k" but-- it just doesn't.

This Lithuanian form and dinner sound like they could be related to the droana liturgy of the Zoroastrians.

Yes, that is plausible: the "r" is a little puzzling, but stop+liquid compounds do often reduce to just the stop (Sanskrit ghee from the grease root, for example) so maybe "r" was in the Proto-Indo-European although lost in most branches. And: to your proposal that the Zoroastrian "communal dinner" rituals had some influence on the Christian eucharist, I just said "interesting"; this is one of your hypotheses that I can't rule out, since the Christian ritual is not a straightforward derivation of the Jewish passover.

For Daena > den see Daena - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

That's what I'd looked at, finding no suggestions there for any Indo-European etymology. Since there is no sign that the word comes from Proto-Indo-European, whereas Semitic has a root similar in both sound and meaning, a borrowing from Semitic into Iranian is what looks most probable.

That would mean there would have to have been a contact between the Semites and the Aryans when the Gathas were composed and you keep on implying that there was none.

I believe there were none prior to c. 1500 BC when the exuberantly polytheistic Mitanni burst into the Middle East, and that there was little or no knowledge of Zoroastrian monotheists in the Middle East prior to the expansion of the Persians starting c. 600 BC. I believe that the Gathas were composed between 1000 and 1200 BC, and that the Iranians had been influenced by the Middle East much more than they had influenced anybody-- for the simple reason that the Middle East was a powerful civilization, while the Iranians were still steppe nomads, barely getting the hang of even animal herding. For example, in a report on Somalia the BBC mentioned that the English words "dollar" and "goddamn" are universally understood in that country, and I would imagine that those words are well-known in, say, Papua as well-- but, for obvious reasons, there aren't any words from Somali or Papuan languages that are well-known in America. What you just don't want to grasp is that Iranians were backwoods, unimportant people before the Persians.

Or as you sometimes conclude that if the Iranian didn't come from the Semitic that they both came from Nostratic.

It depends on what the evidentiary pattern is. If a word is widespread in multiple branches of Indo-European, so that it is likely to trace back to Proto-Indo-European, and also widespread in Semitic, so that it is likely to trace back to Proto-Semitic (or Proto-Afro-Asiatic, but to verify that I would need more knowledge of the non-Semitic branches of Afro-Asiatic than I actually have), then a good hypothesis is that there is no borrowing in either direction, but rather a common inheritance from a distant ancestor. On the other hand, if a word is widespread in Semitic, but found in only one branch of Indo-European, then a borrowing from Semitic is more likely. If a word was widespread in Indo-European, but found only spottily in Semitic, THAT is a case for borrowing in the other direction, but I'm just not seeing much of that: Asshur from asura is the best-looking case so far; if indeed that comes from Indo-European, it would be from the Indo-Iranian branch, and at a very early date before "Iranian" yet existed as a distinct sub-branch.

 

[mojobadshah]

Well, *I* was taught, indeed, that the Nazis were crazy and that their notion of the "Aryan race" was a fiction, that "Aryan" was really just an old word for the Indo-Iranians, and so on. If you didn't get that, it appears to be more of a function of how little you paid attention in school than of what anybody tries to teach.

First off I'm talking about High School. Are you? And no, that I and all my peers do not recall being taught who the real Aryans are in high school proves my point even further. Based on my statistical correlations the only Aryans most people are aware of are the Aryans of Nazi conception. Hence, not enough emphasis is put on who the real Aryans were and are in order to prevent confusion between the real Aryans and the Aryans of Nazi conception. It's totally insensitive to the living Aryans.

And the Indics; the branch that you are referring to abandoned the pronunciation "Aryan" in favor of "Iran" many thousands of years ago, which is why "Iranian" is the standard term; and the hyphenated "Indo-Iranian" has become the standard term for the older group from which both Indics and Iranians sprang, to avoid any confusion from the mis-appropriation of the "Aryan" name, which nobody is just going to be able to forget about, however much you wish they would.

Look I understand that its important that schools expose students to the myth of the Nazi conception of the Aryan, but there is no reason why they should not be putting in the extra effort to prevent confusion between a totally legitimate national ancestry and one based on a false hypothesis. The schools don't go around exposing students to a term associated with discriminatory concept and confusing it with the Greek, Italic, Celtic, etc... ancestries.

And why on earth are the Tajiks (real Aryans), for example, being stiffed because of something that the Germans did to the Jews?

Wrong. The British declared war when the Germans attacked POLAND; the German air attacks on British soil came later.

Not very "neutral", no; we did not contribute troops but were supplying arms to the British side.

Yeah, actually it does mean that. You are just being silly. You think that because it is necessary to teach that the Nazis had strange concepts, that anybody who even mentions that such strange concepts did exist must be endorsing their truth.

I stand corrected, however, it does not mean that the British or Americans didn't buy into the Nazi conception of the Aryans. All it means is that they viewed the Nazi's as a threat.

You're just wrong. If you actually read the books, you find thorough discussion of where the word really came from, and how the 19th-20th century usages were misguided. There is nobody in academia who puts forth the view that the Nazis were right in their usage of "Aryan". You are arguing against imaginary people.

I've read that before. That article like so many others uses the form Aryan interchangeably with similar forms. In other words at certain points it doesn't distinguish between the Arya, Airya, Aryan and other forms. I wasn't saying that people in academia argue that the Nazis were right in their usage of the Aryan, but they way schools indoctrinate students on the phenomenon is practically subliminal. It leaves students thinking that the Aryans were blond hair blue eyed types, for example, and without any notion of that there were historical Aryans who have living descendants Afghans, Iranians, Tajiks, etc...

You are mistaken. India is where the aryan pronunciation is still alive to this day; Iran is where iran became the pronunciation thousands of years ago. I would have thought this was common knowledge.

Nope. I'm not mistaken. The Afghans, Iranians, etc... are all aware of their Aryan heritage. The form is very much alive. The place-name Aryana is synonymous with the place-name Afghanistan. Afghanistan's airlines is called "Ariana Afghan airlines." When did the Indians call themselves Aryans? The Germans never even called themselves Aryans. At this stage in my research it would appear to me that both the Europeans and the Indians have just high jacked this form Aryan. Yes both the "Iranians" and the Indians used the form Airya and Arya respectively. But there is nothing to substantiate that Arya was ever used as anything other than to denote a "noble individual" until late when the place-name Arya-Varta comes into use, which is long after the "Iranians" were using the forms like Airya as national self-designators. Airyana, the homeland of the Airya is mentioned as early as the Young Avestan period. And the first time the form Aryan verbatim comes into use is in the imperial title in Sasanian inscriptions written the Parthian language "MLKYN MLKʾ aryān ut anaryān kē šihr hač yazdān" which I believe translates to "King of Kings of the Aryan and non-Aryan whose kingdom is worthy of praise."

I'm pretty sure that the term came into use among westerners when M. De Sacy deciphered these inscriptions in 1739. Apparently the form Arian in the Indo-European sense was first used in 1849, 1 year after De Sacy died (suspect) though I can't locate any sources. Yet the term Arian was used consistently to designate the "Iranians" from 1847-1850. Even De Gobineau didn't use this form. He designated the "White Race" Ariane not Arian. E.H. Nolan used the forms Arian and Iranian interchangeably to designate the Indo-Europeans. (anyone else starting to see signs of suspect here?) I see the form Indo-Aryan came into use in 1880 by Sir Monier Williams. And the the form Aryan verbatim didn't come into use until the British came out with a translation of Mein Kampf and must have substituted the German reconstructions *Arisch and *Arier. (very suspect) From what I can see it would appear the Indo-Europeanists have been trying to co-opt the Aryan heritage (whilst there has not been an Aryan presence in the west...)

 

[bob x]

that I and all my peers do not recall being taught who the real Aryans are in high school proves my point even further.

You do not recall being taught even the very basic outline of the World War Two story. I don't know what was in your specific textbooks, of course, but I don't know that adding more material would change the problem of students not absording the material anyway.

The schools don't go around exposing students to a term associated with discriminatory concept and confusing it with the Greek, Italic, Celtic, etc... ancestries.

Because nobody using such discriminatory concepts set the world on fire.

And I don't see any Celts here arguing that instead of saying "Celtic" we should all use some horribly archaic pronunciation of the name that fell out of general use thousands of years ago.

And why on earth are the Tajiks (real Aryans), for example, being stiffed because of something that the Germans did to the Jews?

What the Germans did (to a lot of people besides just the Jews) is a crucial event in history. Tajikistan just isn't very important: I would like students to be able to find it on a map, but even that seems to be too much to hope for.

That article like so many others uses the form Aryan interchangeably with similar forms. In other words at certain points it doesn't distinguish between the Arya, Airya, Aryan and other forms.

Yeah, well it's had a lot of different pronunciations. "Iranian" is the pronunciation which has mostly been used by the people you pretend to be concerned about.

From what I can see it would appear the Indo-Europeanists have been trying to co-opt the Aryan heritage (whilst there has not been an Aryan presence in the west...)

In the NINETEENTH CENTURY, Indo-Europeanists mistakenly thought the word went all the way back to Proto-Indo-European and might be a good term to use for the whole group. This is the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, when Indo-Europeanists decided a long time ago that the best way to avoid confusion is just not to use an archaic word that has been misused in so many garbled senses. If you want to talk about Kurdish, Ossetian, Farsi, Tajik etc. speakers the standard term is "Iranian". If you want to talk about the group from which they and the Indics descended, the standard term is "Indo-Iranian."

 

[mojobadshah]

You do not recall being taught even the very basic outline of the World War Two story. I don't know what was in your specific textbooks, of course, but I don't know that adding more material would change the problem of students not absording the material anyway.

Stop trying to discredit me on the basic outline of WWII, when the point is that the British and Americans only got involved in the war because they realized the Germans were a threat to them, and not because they didn't agree with their racial philosophy. If teachers truly exposed students to the facts instead of catering to the Nazi's the students would come out with the understanding that the "Iranians" are the real Aryans and not with the Nazi conception of the Aryans.

Because nobody using such discriminatory concepts set the world on fire.

Discriminatory concept is one thing, but to confuse students to the point that when a genuine Aryan tells them that they are an Aryan and they display signs of denial is another thing, and totally f'd up.

And I don't see any Celts here arguing that instead of saying "Celtic" we should all use some horribly archaic pronunciation of the name that fell out of general use thousands of years ago.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Celt is just another word for Gaul. Nobody makes either the Celts or the Gauls out to be racists.

What the Germans did (to a lot of people besides just the Jews) is a crucial event in history. Tajikistan just isn't very important: I would like students to be able to find it on a map, but even that seems to be too much to hope for.

What about the Tajik Americans? I don't think you really give a damn about whether students are able to find Tajikistan on a map. I don't even see why you would fight against my point. What you are saying is totally discriminatory against the Tajiks and the rest of the real Aryans.

Yeah, well it's had a lot of different pronunciations. "Iranian" is the pronunciation which has mostly been used by the people you pretend to be concerned about.

I am concerned about the Iranians. I'm also concerned about the rest of the world. And I believe that the world has the right to know the truth on this matter and not some conartist's artists interpretation of history and the identity of the Aryans.

In the NINETEENTH CENTURY, Indo-Europeanists mistakenly thought the word went all the way back to Proto-Indo-European and might be a good term to use for the whole group. This is the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, when Indo-Europeanists decided a long time ago that the best way to avoid confusion is just not to use an archaic word that has been misused in so many garbled senses. If you want to talk about Kurdish, Ossetian, Farsi, Tajik etc. speakers the standard term is "Iranian". If you want to talk about the group from which they and the Indics descended, the standard term is "Indo-Iranian."

I already told you "Iranian" is way too confusing for the laymen. To even suggest "Iranian" to designate the entire language-family in question including the Kurdish, Ossetian, Farsi, Tajik and not "Aryan" is pure Nazi politics. In other words let the world think the people who aren't the real Aryans are the real Aryans, and supress the people who are the real Aryans. And what this interprets to when it comes to world politics is a serious SERIOUS offense.

 

[bob x]

Stop trying to discredit me on the basic outline of WWII

You're arguing about what you were supposedly taught in school, when it doesn't look like you paid any attention in school, so it is hard to tell what really was in your textbooks or whether it would make any difference if the content of the textbooks were changed.

the point is that the British and Americans only got involved in the war because they realized the Germans were a threat to them, and not because they didn't agree with their racial philosophy.

The philosophy WAS the threat. Nobody cares if another country is internally ruled by a lunatic dictator (well, lots of liberal-minded people do care, but the politicians generally shrug and say "we have to be realistic"). It was the whole "Everybody must be subjugated to us, because we are naturally superior!" bit which MADE Germany a threat.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Celt is just another word for Gaul. Nobody makes either the Celts or the Gauls out to be racists.

What I mean is, suppose some crazed evil group did start using the word "Gaul" for some bizarre meaning of their own, and a hundred million people died in the struggle against that group. The word "Gaul" would tend to be avoided afterwards, particularly since "Celt" has, anyway, been the more popularly used word among people of Celtic descent, for centuries now. It would seem very strange for someone to get incensed about the fact that "Celt" is the usual word nowadays, or to insist that it is wrong for schools to think the recent slaughter of a hundred million people is a more important subject to teach than the ancient linguistics of France and the British Isles.

What about the Tajik Americans? I don't think you really give a damn about whether students are able to find Tajikistan on a map.

I really do. I find it distressing that you think Tajikistan and the Caucasus are the same thing. What about Georgian Americans, or Armenian Americans? The word "Caucasian" has also become problematic, because of its misuse by would-be racial classifiers.

I already told you "Iranian" is way too confusing for the laymen.

And I am baffled why you think so. Even among those like myself who do know the original meaning of "Aryan", it is confusing to have to wonder when someone else uses the word whether they have any meaning like the original in mind, or some later garbling of the meaning. "Iranian" raises no such confusion.

To even suggest "Iranian" to designate the entire language-family in question including the Kurdish, Ossetian, Farsi, Tajik and not "Aryan" is pure Nazi politics.

Uh, the pronunciation "Iranian" is what the Iranians themselves chose, a very long ago. Pronunciations like "Aryan" are more often found in India, and you for some peculiar reason want to exclude the Indics from "Aryan", a usage of the word which is neither faithful to the original history nor to what anyone hearing the word would expect you to be meaning.

 

[mojobadshah]

You're arguing about what you were supposedly taught in school, when it doesn't look like you paid any attention in school, so it is hard to tell what really was in your textbooks or whether it would make any difference if the content of the textbooks were changed.

I don't have access to the history textbook of New York State high schools. I presume that the one New York State History classes use is "Glencoe World History Modern Times." I was however able to access a "Reading Essentials and Study Guide" on Hitler and Nazi Germany, and I see that it discusses the term Aryan.

"Hitler wanted to develop an Aryan racial state that would dominate Europe
and possibly the world for generations to come. Nazis thought that the
Germans were the true descendants and leaders of the Aryans. (They misused the term Aryan to mean the ancient Greeks and Romans and twentieth-century Germans and Scandinavians.)"

I see that the text does also mention that the Nazis "misused the term Aryan," however it does nothing to prevent confusion between the Nazi conception of the Aryans and the Aryans by national ancestry and linguistic association including the Afghans, Iranians, Tajiks, etc... Moreover it doesn't expose the reader to the fact that the Germans were not the true descendants of the Aryans. Nor does it expose the reader to the fact that the only descendants of a people to historically have called themselves "Aryan" are included in the Aryan language-family (Afghans, Iranians, Tajiks, etc..).

The philosophy WAS the threat. Nobody cares if another country is internally ruled by a lunatic dictator (well, lots of liberal-minded people do care, but the politicians generally shrug and say "we have to be realistic"). It was the whole "Everybody must be subjugated to us, because we are naturally superior!" bit which MADE Germany a threat.

Once again that the Nazi philosophy was a threat, Germans thinking they were Aryans, doesn't mean that the British and Americans thought that the Nazi concept of the Aryan was a threat. It doesn't mean that they didn't think they were Aryans themselves then and it doesn't mean that they don't think that now.

What I mean is, suppose some crazed evil group did start using the word "Gaul" for some bizarre meaning of their own, and a hundred million people died in the struggle against that group. The word "Gaul" would tend to be avoided afterwards, particularly since "Celt" has, anyway, been the more popularly used word among people of Celtic descent, for centuries now. It would seem very strange for someone to get incensed about the fact that "Celt" is the usual word nowadays, or to insist that it is wrong for schools to think the recent slaughter of a hundred million people is a more important subject to teach than the ancient linguistics of France and the British Isles.

First off the Nazis didn't use the word Aryan. The Nazis used the words Arisch and Arier. So why do the schoolbooks insist on using the term Aryan instead of the term that the Nazis really used? Second off using the word Celt isn't confusable with an ethnic designation that is already in existence. Celtic is distinct from both the words Irish and Scottish. Iranian is not distinct from Iranian. The Afghans (eg. Pashtuns) aren't Iranian. The Kurds aren't Iranian. Aryan is way less confusing when trying to refer to all three groups collectively.

I really do. I find it distressing that you think Tajikistan and the Caucasus are the same thing. What about Georgian Americans, or Armenian Americans? The word "Caucasian" has also become problematic, because of its misuse by would-be racial classifiers.

I called the Hindu Kush the eastern Caucuses because Josiah Harlan and others apparently called the Hindu Kush and the Himalayans the Indian Caucuses back in the day. And the mountains from the Himalayans to the Caucuses are part of the same mountain range.

And I am baffled why you think so. Even among those like myself who do know the original meaning of "Aryan", it is confusing to have to wonder when someone else uses the word whether they have any meaning like the original in mind, or some later garbling of the meaning. "Iranian" raises no such confusion.

No, it's pure stupidity from where I'm standing to use the term Iranian to refer to the Iranians, Afghans, Tajiks, Kurds, etc... collectively and not Aryan. And if there's any confusion between the Nazi concept of the Aryans and the these original Aryans then the schools are at fault. That is where the problem begins.

Uh, the pronunciation "Iranian" is what the Iranians themselves chose, a very long ago. Pronunciations like "Aryan" are more often found in India, and you for some peculiar reason want to exclude the Indics from "Aryan", a usage of the word which is neither faithful to the original history nor to what anyone hearing the word would expect you to be meaning.

Of course the Iranians chose Iranian, but the Afghans, nor the Tajiks, nor the Kurds did.