According to Pomponius Mela (45CE) the "nearest to India is Ariane then Aria" clearly distinguishing between Aria (Herat) and Ariane which is clearly placed in "Iran" somewhere.
Pomponius is using the word narrowly (most other authors use it broadly to include Aria/Herat and beyond into Central Asia) for an area which is
clearly in northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan, occupied by more Indic- than Iranian-speakers. Iran is in the
opposite direction,
further from (not "nearest to") India than Herat is.
bob x said:
You found one and only one author, from Germany, 160 years ago, who ever used arianisch for "Iranians" to the exclusion of the "Indics"; can you find anybody who ever wrote in English and used "Aryan" that way?
If you mean can I find anyone who wrote in English and used the form Arian in reference to the "Iranians" to the exclusion of the Indics, yes, before Bopp, after Bopp, and include English translations before WII. Otherwise I'm not sure what you mean?
That's exactly what I mean. I had never ever heard of such a usage ("Aryan" meaning
only "Iranians" to the exclusion of "Indics") until you pointed to Bopp using it that way: but the word Bopp actually used (I finally found the
original see p. 1258 note at bottom) was in fact not
arianisch as I supposed earlier, but
arisch: I couldn't find the passage you originally cited, but here is another
auch bei diesen Woertern die Lettischen und Slawischen Sprachen von den Arischen oder Medo-Persischen sich dadurch lossagen, dass sie nicht die Skt. Lautgruppe s'v zu sp umgewandelt, sondern das alte Halbvokal unveraendert gelassen haben "also in these words the Baltic and Slavic languages distinguish themselves from the
[that word] or Medo-Persian, in that they have not shifted the Sanskrit sound-group s'v->sp, but have left the old semi-vowel (w) unchanged."
Anyway, he's the only author I've seen doing that, and he was writing in German. Your theory is that
English-speakers used to say "Aryan" for "Iranian" only (who? when?) until they maliciously mis-translated a German adjective as part of a conspiracy to smear the good name of Iranians. None of this has much contact with reality.
Can you confirm that? [i.e., that previous knowledge of Sanskrit was used to figure out old Iranian]
Looking in Bopp, in fact, I find this passage in the preface: "It was a beautiful result of our European Sanskrit-Philology, something which in India, right under the nose of Sanskrit so to speak, had no longer been understood, that obscure words in neighboring languages could be recognized as cognates. This research has not been worked out completely, although I have no doubt it will be. Here Rask's writing (published 1826, and now through Hagen's translation widely available)
Concerning the Antiquity and Genuineness of the Zend-Avesta and its Avestan Language must be honored as a pioneering effort."
Because maybe Sanskrit had something to do with the vowels, but there are no Sanskrit forms of the word aryan without a suffix attached to it eg. aryanti not V-r-y-n.
Why are you so hung up on the particular form of adjectival suffixes? Do you think it is illegitimate to call people from Brazil, Peru etc. South "Americans"? After all, in Spanish and Portuguese they say
Americano, never ending the word with just plain
-n but always tacking an "o" onto the end-- so, by your principles, only people from the US deserve to be called "American"? (Maybe we could allow Canadians to be called "North American", at least the English-speakers-- but not the Quebecois, since
Americain is obviously a totally different word.) OK, Middle Persian used
-n as an adjectival ending, like English (or Gaelic, for that matter), but Sanskrit and German do not-- so?
So in the end the reason De Sacy and other others chose the form Aryan must have been because the Parthians used that form.
How would he know? How would anybody? There was a sad shortage of tape recorders in the ancient world! What we know is that:
In Avestan the root got written down as
airya- and we hope that the shifted vowel represents a faithful oral preservation of the antique pronunciation.
In Achaemenid times there was an "open-syllabary" script (each symbol standing for a CV syllable) for Old Persian which required extra vowels to be thrown in or complex vowels to be simplified: so we are not sure if
da.ra.ya.wu.sha. was pronounced "Daraywush" or "Darayawush"; we get
a.ri.ya. but don't know if that is "Ariya" or "Arya" or "Airya" (perhaps
ri. used for "ir" here?).
In Parthian times the Aramaic script wrote no vowels. Greek borrows the name as
Ariane but Greek always tended to simplify complex vowels when borrowing from Persian (as in "Darius") so that might have been "Airyane" for all we know.
By Sassanian times the name is
Eran. SO??? It's all the same word. In India the pronunciation has been totally stable, although the meaning has drifted (from ethnicity to class); in Iranian the meaning has been more stable (ethnicity, or geographic region) but the pronunciation has drifted.
By the way what is the affix in aryanti because I thought arya- was the root, you're saying ary- is the root, so is it anti-, -nti, or -ti?
I write the root as
ary- because sometimes it does not take that "a" vowel but shifts "y" to "i" instead, as in that Rig Veda cite. I do not know if the suffix here is
-nti with "a" as a bridge-vowel, or
-anti; is there some reason it matters?
Do you even know what you are looking at here? The title is
Concerning the Oldest Time-period of Indian History, with Overview of the Literature. The passage you are citing says, precisely, that the original self-name of the Indic invaders was the same word as the old Iranian root; that "Aryan" meant their common ancestors, in the Central Asian steppes somewhere.
When I said caste I meant caste in the same way that the Zoroaster and the Magi were of a "Priestly Caste" and born into their service.
The word used for Zoroaster's family of hereditary practicioners of the fire-cult was
Atharva and the same word is used in the Vedas (as the title of the fourth Veda, in fact).
The sources I've seen have pointed to Arya denoting "holy singers."
WHICH sources? Sanskrit for the "singers" is
r.shi and for "priests" in general is
brahman while
arya refers to any member of the invader-race; the passage we were discussing uses it for a soldier.
Talgeri isn't even sure that the word Arya was ever used as a national designation.
This is the opposite of the truth. Talgeri marshalls the evidence
in favor of "Arya" having started out as an ethnic designation before taking on any other significations.
Meanwhile, in India, the British colonial government had followed de Gobineau's arguments along another line, and had fostered the idea of a superior "Aryan race" that co-opted the Indian caste system in favor of imperial interests. -
Aryan
??? You are making up nonsense here. No, the British government took no particular notice of a pseudo-scientist writing in French, nor ever promoted the "Aryan race" concept; and there is nothing in the Wiki article you cite as a source that gives any clue where you are getting this from.
William Jones first designated the IE. Indic languages Arya around 1786.
He used "Arya" as the noun and "Aryan" as the adjective, which is perfectly normal in English.
De Sacy popularized the form Aryan derived from Parthian in the 1790's.
"Popularized"? You need to show me any popular usage that derives from his work. He published a translation of the Parthian that assumed Iranian words were the same as or similar to known forms from Sanskrit; somehow you get from this that the thought Iranian words were something totally different from the Indic, and somehow you get the notion that lots of people (who?) followed him in this usage.
The British Raj was established in 1858.
Victoria assumed the title "Empress of India" (for diplomatic parity with other sovereigns calling themselves "Emperors") at that time, but England had dominated India
for a century by then, after long European presence with increasing power:
"First came the Portuguese in 1498, and secured certain strips of the western coast (Goa, Chaul, Bombay, Bassein, Damão, Diu). More than a century later the Dutch, sworn enemies of the Portuguese, established themselves in Nagapatam, Madras, Pulicat, etc., besides wresting Cochin and other portions of territory from the Portuguese. The English East India Company (founded in 1600) soon acquired stations at Sarat, Calicut, Masulipatam, Madras, and (by cession) Bombay (1661 — 5). Before 1700 the French had secured Masulipatam, Pondicherry, and Chandernagore, while at the same time the Danes held Tranquebar and Serampur. In the conflict which followed the Portuguese, Dutch, and Danes counted for little, and the two last named powers ultimately lost all footing in the country. The struggle was chiefly between the English and the French, both of whom tried to win the various native princes over by persuasion, treaty, subsidy, or force, and played them off against the opposing power. The growth of the English supremacy was steady but gradual. By the battle of Plassey in 1757 they became virtually masters of Bengal. By 1784 they had secured sway along the east coast (Circars and Carnatic). In 1795 they were dominant in Bengal and Behar, the Circars, Madras, Carnatic, Malabar, etc. In 1805 they had reached up the Ganges valley as far as Bellary and along the Kanara coasts. In 1823 British territory reached almost all round the coast from Assam to Gujerat, and extended inwards in such a way that the Native States resembled islands in a sea (Travancore, Mysore, Nizam's dominions, Kolhapur, Mahratta States, Rajputana, Oudh, etc). In 1843 Sind was added to the British dominions; in 1849, the Punjab; in 1854, Nagpur; in 1856, Oudh; and in 1885, Burma."
Actually "Aryan" for "white race" was derived from the "Iranian" form Ariane cf. Airyanam.
No, the emphasis that "Aryans" were the whiter people is taken from the Rig Veda.
And if they had used "Arisch" like they say "English" or "Irish" the Irish may have ended up making a parallel point to my own. There is no reason that schools can't use Aryan in reference to the Airya, Persians, Afghans, Iranians etc.. and Arisch in reference to the "Master Race" which is what the Nazis really called the "Master Race."
Schoolbooks for English-speaking students are written in English; words from German or any other foreign language are translated into their English forms. The suffix "-ish" has not been used to form adjectives of nationality or ethnicity since Anglo-Saxon times ("English" and "Irish" are fossils from before the Norman Conquest); instead we generally use "-an" and there is nothing unusual about doing so here.
