Odp: [tied] Arya-

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 6698
Date: 2001-03-23

The Old Irish and Gaulish words are burdened with the usual Celtic ambiguities (anything from *h2ar-jo- to *prH-jo- or the like would work there), which seriously diminishes their value as comparative data. I wouldn't exclude the possibility of PIE having a legal term like *h2ar(j)o-, possibly somehow (but how?) derived from *h2ar- 'put together, fit, arrange', but the evidence for it is scanty.
 
I will not directly address longgren's usual avalanche of mass-comparanda, most of which have no value when examined individually (he lists, among other things, German Ehre/OE a:r, which come from PGmc. < ais-ó-, the PIE "king" word *(H)reg^-, and lots of Germanic words with initial h- < *k(^); none of them merits mention as a possible cognate of arya-) and I'll leave his accusations of "emotions, politics, and irrationality distorting reality" unanswered. The only sensible part of his posting is the quote from the EIEC, which does accept the *h2er(j)o- etymon with the usually quoted Anatolian and Indo-Iranian support and the usual guarded mention of Celtic.
 
Now, Anatolian *ara- 'companion, mate' and its derivatives and Indo-Iranian *arja- may be loans from the same or a similar source in the Near East (that's in fact what Szemerényi explicitly claims) -- not Ugaritic itself, to be sure, but some older Semitic language. If "seven" and a few other terms were able to migrate from (Proto-)Semitic into PIE, why not a more recent loan referring to social structure, adopted only by the IE languages spoken in or around the Middle East? I am aware that Alani < *arjana-, which means that the word crossed the Caucasus and the Pontic Iranians used it as well; still, it remains an areal word within PIE and Szemerényi's etymology (which is semantically beyond reproach) looks to me more parsimonious than other competing explanations.
 
Piotr
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Christopher Gwinn
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2001 11:58 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Arya-

Piotr wrote:
> I don't think that cognates of *arja- and *a:r(i)ja- are
> attested in IE branches other than Indo-Iranian, or that an
> original meaning like "noble, honourable" or "high, lofty,
> etc." can be attributed to these terms. The idea that other
> IE groups (the Irish, in particular) called themselves the
> Aryas in ancient times is a 19th-century myth.

What would you then make of Gaulish Ariios and Ariomanus (seems to look an
awful lot like Vedic Aryaman) as well as Irish Aire and perhaps even Eremon
(may be the Irish equivalent of Gaulish Ariomanus, as Old Irish er- can
occasionally stand for air-)? What of Old Norse nom. pl. arjoster which
Pokorny has as "Vornehmsten"?

Old Irish Aire definitely meant "lord/chief", but can also mean, in a legal
sense, every freeman, commoner and noble that possesses independent legal
status.

I guess the question is whether or not Gaulish Ariios and Irish Aire come
from PIE *aryo- or perhaps from PIE *Peri-. I do not think that the original
PIE speakers called themselves "Aryans," but it does seem likely that they
had a legal term for "Freemen".

-Chris Gwinn