Re: Meaning of Aryan: now, "white people"?

From: mkelkar2003
Message: 53201
Date: 2008-02-15

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@...>
wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@>
> wrote:
>
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > 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... 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-.
> >
> > Apparently Wikipedia does not buy into this fantastical story
> > which is a corolloary of the now defunct Aryan Invasion Theory...
> >
> > Here Koenraad Elst squares off the IE-Uralic contact into an Indian
> > Homeland scenerio thus:...
> >
> > "It was the Iranians who came in contact with Uralic on a large
> > scale..."
> >
> > 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
>
> =============
>
> Koenraad Elst and the others ‘Out-of-India’ theorists who claim
that
> the Indo-Iranian loan words in Uralic come from some Iranian source
> (s), and not from Proto-Indo-Iranian, have not studied the subject
> in depth. Just to make an example, another strong case (in addition
> to Proto-Indo-Iranian *arya- > Uralic ‘slave’) for the existence of
> old linguistic contacts between groups of Uralic and Proto-Indo-
> Iranian speakers in the steppe-taiga interface zone east and west of
> the Urals is provided by the Proto-Indo-Iranian word *asura- ‘lord,
> god, asura (= antigod)’, which is reflected in old loans in Uralic
> both in the meanings 'lord' and 'rich':
>
> - Mordvinian (Erzya) azoro- ‘lord’
> - Mansi (Vogul) at@ər-, o:t@... 'chieftain, sovereign, prince'
> - Udmurt (Votyak) uzir-, uz@... 'rich'
> - Komi (Zyrian) ozir- 'rich'
>
> Note that, if these words had been loaned from some Iranian language
> (s), the borrowed form should have been something like ahura- (the
> corresponding term in Avestan, where the /s/ > /h/ change had
> already occurred), not asura-. Yet the typical Iranian aspiration is
> absent in *all* the Uralic words listed above.
>
> Actually it is the whole belt from the Ukraine to Siberia that
> contains hints or direct attestations of the old Proto-Indo-Iranian
> *asura-. Compare, respectively:
>
> - Ess, the highest god of the Ket Yenisseians of Middle Siberia;
> - the Buryat Mongolian äsi gods of the forests/mountains;
> - the yz gods of the Gilyak (Paleosiberians of the the lower Amur
> valley and Sakhalin).
>
> There is much more linguistic material which contradicts the OITers’
> odd arguments about the nature of the IIr. loans into Uralic and
> some languages of Siberia. I have just uploaded in the files section
> a Word document named “PIIr. loan words in Finno-Ugrian and
> Yenisseian.doc”. You can access the direct link from the following
> announcement message:
>
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/53180
>
> To Kelkar:
>
> Please read the document in question (an excerpt from a paper by
> Michael Witzel) AS A LINGUIST WOULD DO and then come back with your
> counter-arguments (if any).
>
> Regards,
> Francesco
>

Brighenti:

If you throw in Dravidian with this Indo-Uralic stuff it is quite a
kitchen sink, isn't it? See what the not so in depth scholar Elst says
bout this:

"A third partner in this relation�ship must also be taken into
account, though its connection with Uralic looks older and deeper than
that of PIE: Dravidian. Witzel (1999/1:349) acknowledges the
"lingui�stic connections of Dravidian with Uralic". Both are families
of aggluti�native languages with flexive tendencies, abhorring
consonant clusters and favouring the stress on the first syllable.
Sergent (1997:65-72) maps out their relationship in some detail, again
pointing to the northwest outside India as the origin of Dravidian. We
may ignore Sergent's theory of an African origin of Dravidian for now,
and limit our attention to his less eccentric position that a
Proto-Dravidian group at one point ended up in Central Asia, there to
leave substra�tum traces discerni�ble even in the IE immigrant
language Tocharian. The most successful lineage of Dravidians outside
India was the one which mixed its language with some Palaeo-Siberian
tongue, yielding the Uralic langua�ge family.

Looking around for a plausible location for this develop�ment, we find
that Siberia may have been a peripheral part where the resulting
language could survive best in relative isolation, but that its
origins may have been in a more crossroads-like region such as
Bactria-Sogdia."

There Bactria Sogdia surfaces again! Nichols may be onto something.
All this mixup IE, Uralic, Dravidian may have been happening there. At
present no one can no for sure when and how?

M. Kelkar