--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@...>
wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@>
> wrote:
>
> > I seem to remember reading that the term [arya] was also used by
> > the Tokharians -- but it may have borrowed from Iranian. I think
> > I read it in the context of arya/orya meaning "slave" in some
> > Uralic language -- the idea being they got it from Tokharian,
> > which according to what I read is the IE language most affected by
> > interaction with Uralic.
>
> As far as I know, the Finnish word for 'slave' (presumably captured
> in raids into southern territories), orja-, is considered one of the
> many loan words from *Proto-Indo-Iranian* (not from Proto-Tocharian)
> into Uralic which would indicate that:
>
> 1. the early habitat of Proto-Indo-Iranians was in an area close to
> the Central Asian steppe-taiga interface, e.g., near the Urals;
>
> 2. these Proto-Indo-Iranians called themselves *arya-.
>
> Other Uralic loan words from Proto-Indo-Iranian *arya- are Pre-Saami
> *orja- > oar'ji-'southwest', a%r'jel- 'southerner'; Estonian ori-,
> Udmurt var-, Komi ver-, Mordovian ur/a"- 'slave'.
Apparently Wikipedia does not buy into this fantastical story which is
a corolloary of the now defunct Aryan Invasion Theory. The "arya"
slaves of yester years become arya the nobles obviously after
slaughtering the dark skinned Indian dasyus!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arya
Here Koenraad Elst squares off the IE-Uralic contact into an Indian
Homeland scenerio thus:
"In that case, two alternative explanations are equally sustainable.
Imagine the first waves of emigrants from India, taking most of the
ancestor-dialects of the various branches of the IE family with them,
through the Oxus valley to the Wolga plain and beyond. With the
exception of Tokharic which remained in the area, they did not come in
contact with Uralic, or when they did, they linguistically swallowed
this marginal Uralic-speaking population without allowing it much
substratal influence. Only the Slavic branch of IE shows some
substratal influence from Uralic (and even this is disputed), a fact
which is neatly compatible with an India-to-Europe migration: an
Uralic-speaking tribe in the peri-Caspian region got assimilated in
the westwardly expanding IE-speaking population.
It was the Iranians who came in contact with Uralic on a large scale,
partly because they filled up the whole of Central Asia and (in the
Scythian expansion) even Eastern Europe as far as Western Ukraine and
Belarus, where an older Slavic population subsisted and adopted a lot
of Iranian vocabulary, just as the Uralic population to its northeast
did; and partly because the Uralic-speaking people were moving
westward through the Urals region in a movement parallel to the
Iranian westward expansion. At any rate, the Iranian influence is
uncontroversial and easily compatible with any IE Urheimat scenario."
http://www.bharatvani.org/books/ait/ch34.htm
The following is intersting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_language
"Often quoted loan examples are kuningas "king" and ruhtinas "prince,
high ranking nobleman" from Germanic *kuningaz and *druhtinaz, but
another example is äiti "mother", from Gothic eiþai, which is
interesting because borrowing of close-kinship vocabulary is a rare
phenomenon. The original Finnish emo has become a cranberry morpheme.
There are other close-kinship words that are loaned from Baltic and
Germanic languages (morsian "bride", armas "dear"). Examples of the
ancient Indo-Iranian loans are vasara "hammer" from Avestan vadra,
vajra and orja "slave" from arya, airya "man" (the latter probably via
similar circumstances as slave from Slav in many European languages)."
That fact that close kinship vocabularly can be borrowed puts a dent
into the idea of genetically separated families especially if they
occupay a vast contigous area like Eurasia. Morover were no loand
from Uralic into IE which starnge if these langauges were in mutual
conntact. More likely as Elst says orya is a late loan from the
Iranians who moved into Central Asia.
M. Kelkar
>
> The case is different with Tocharian languages, which borrowed the
> term a:rya- from Indo-Aryan, most likely via some Iranian language.
> Thus, we have Tocharian B a:rs'e- (prob.) 'monk', Tocharian A a:rs'i-
> (prob.) 'ordained beggar monk' (as a noun) and `Aryan' (as an
> adjective relating to Buddhist religiousness). The noun a:rs'i- has
> occasionally been claimed to be an indigenous designation of the
> Tocharian A language or an ethnic self-designation of its speakers,
> but this interpretation does not seem to be correct. H.W. Bailey,
> for instance, rejects it. Cf. the entry in D.Q. Adams' Tocharian B
> dictionary at
>
> http://tinyurl.com/38xhgf
>
> Hope this helps,
> Francesco
>