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

> Eurasian peoples living to the east and toward the center of the
> continent inhabited sparse, dry landscapes that promoted nomadic
> animal herding and clan-based societies, she notes.
> Clans were dispersed clusters of people belonging to kinship groups
> presided over by a hierarchy of male rulers. Clan members were not
> necessarily biologically related, but they claimed a link to an
> ancient, often mythical ancestor.
> Clans on the eastern edge of the spread zone had a military or
> economic edge on their neighbors, who spoke different languages, and
> these eastern clans fomented the major linguistic diffusions,
> Nichols argues.
> Historical accounts, such as those describing the shift from Turkic
> to Mongol, indicate that these clan rulers often arranged alliances
> with their counterparts to the west. These agreements included a
> voluntary embrace by western rulers of the spreading language, she
> contends. A mixture of economic opportunism and military
> intimidation probably motivated clan leaders to accept an advancing
> language and its speakers' culture, Nichols suggests.
> Thus, the original Indo-Europeans may have made their linguistic
> mark without any of the cultural innovations often ascribed to them.
> "They did not bring agriculture to Europe, tame the horse, invent
> patriarchy and warrior cults, or initiate the Bronze Age," Nichols
> asserts. "They likely had a small competitive edge on
> other steppe societies, but the main reason why their language
> spread was that they happened to be in the right place at the right
> time."
>
> http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/pdfs/data/1995/147-08/14708-11.pdf

What I've read of the Chinese language's altercations with other
languages says it won because of the writing system. That was its
Darwinist edge on the competition. Some of the oldest IE languages
have native grammatical traditions. This is the second best thing,
Darwin-wise. If you stick with the the pre-writing system, ie.
mnemonics and learning ethical and legal bodies of knowledge etc by
heart, you must be certain its foundations don't crumble in the
transmission process, which is why you need a meta-body of knowledge,
namely that of the phonetics and morphology and syntax of the language
in which you memorize. So this might be why IE languages won.


Torsten

> M. Kelkar
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