Ar·y·an (âr  - n,  r-)n. 1. Indo-Iranian. No longer in technical use. 2. A member of the people who spoke the parent language of the Indo-European languages. No longer in technical use. 3. A member of any people speaking an Indo-European language. No longer in technical use. 4. In Nazism and neo-Nazism, a non-Jewish Caucasian, especially one of Nordic type, supposed to be part of a master race. [From Sanskrit  rya-, noble, Aryan.]Ar y·an adj.Word History: It is one of the ironies of history that Aryan, a word nowadays referring to the blond-haired, blue-eyed physical ideal of Nazi Germany, originally referred to a people who looked vastly different. Its history starts with the ancient Indo-Iranians, Indo-European peoples who inhabited parts of what are now Iran, Afghanistan, and India. Their tribal self-designation was a word reconstructed as *arya- or * rya-. The first of these is the form found in Iranian, as ultimately in the name of Iran itself (from Middle Persian  rn ( ahr), "(Land) of the Iranians," from the genitive plural of r, "Iranian"). The variant *rya- is found unchanged in Sanskrit, where it referred to the upper crust of ancient Indian society. These words became known to European scholars in the 18th century. The shifting of meaning that eventually led to the present-day sense started in the 1830s, when Friedrich Schlegel, a German scholar who was an important early Indo-Europeanist, came up with a theory that linked the Indo-Iranian words with the German word Ehre, "honor," and older Germanic names containing the element ario-, such as the Swiss warrior Ariovistus who was written about by Julius Caesar. Schlegel theorized that far from being just a designation of the Indo-Iranians, the word *arya- had in fact been what the Indo-Europeans called themselves, meaning something like "the honorable people." (This theory has since been called into question.) Thus "Aryan" came to be synonymous with "Indo-European," and in this sense entered the general scholarly consciousness of the day. Not much later, it was proposed that the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans had been in northern Europe. From this theory, it was but a small leap to think of the Aryans as having had a northern European physiotype. While these theories were playing themselves out, certain anti-Semitic scholars in Germany took to viewing the Jews in Germany as the main non-Aryan people because of their Semitic roots; a distinction thus arose in their minds between Jews and the "true Aryan" Germans, a distinction that later furnished unfortunate fodder for the racial theories of the Nazis. |
Aryan, Arian [ˈɛərɪən]
n
1. (Social Science / Peoples) (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) (in Nazi ideology) a Caucasian of non-Jewish descent, esp of the Nordic type
2. (Social Science / Peoples) a member of any of the peoples supposedly descended from the Indo-Europeans, esp a speaker of an Iranian or Indic language in ancient times
adj
(Government, Politics & Diplomacy) (Social Science / Peoples) of, relating to, or characteristic of an Aryan or Aryans
adj & n
(Linguistics / Languages) (Social Science / Peoples) Archaic Indo-European
[from Sanskrit ārya of noble birth]
ThesaurusLegend: Synonyms Related Words Antonyms
| Noun | 1. | Aryan - (according to Nazi doctrine) a Caucasian person of Nordic descent (and not a Jew) |
| 2. | Aryan - a member of the prehistoric people who spoke Proto-Indo European primitive, primitive person - a person who belongs to an early stage of civilization | |
| Adj. | 1. | Aryan - of or relating to the former Indo-European people; "Indo-European migrations" |
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