On the Meaning of Aryan
Richard G. Phillips
I see there has been a considerable back-and-forth on
the meaning of the term "Aryan." Allow me to throw
in what I admit is little more than a layman's conjecture.
Roughly speaking, we may take it as meaning North European.
People will frequently say "Aryan" when what they probably
mean is "Nordic" which is more restrictive.
It is not possible to draw a line anywhere in Europe and say
that people on this side are Aryan and on the other side are not.
Also, it is not always possible, for any given individual, to say
that he is or is not Aryan.
Again, roughly speaking, we can say that it embraces the inhabitants
of Germany, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, the British Isles, Poland
and
the Baltic countries. Most French persons would probably qualify as
would many persons in Northern Italy. Russians in the Northwestern
regions
of that country are predominantly Aryan though the Asiatic admixture
becomes heavier as one travels Eastward.
Any reaction?
Jerry Abbott
That sounds about right.
Jerry Abbott
Eugene Holman
> I see there has been a considerable back-and-forth on
> the meaning of the term "Aryan." Allow me to throw
> in what I admit is little more than a layman's conjecture.
>
> Roughly speaking, we may take it as meaning North European.
> People will frequently say "Aryan" when what they probably
> mean is "Nordic" which is more restrictive.
>
This is the meaning given to the term, which already existed and had two
quite different meanings, by the Nazi racial ideologists.
Originally, the term Aryan is from Sanskrit, an ancient language which
developed in India from the speech of Indo-European invaders more than 2500
years ago. It means 'noble' and eventually came to be used by the
lighter-complexioned Indo-Europeans as a term for distinguishing them from
the darker-complexioned indigenous, mostly Dravidian, population. Linguists
still sometimes use the term 'Indo-Aryan' to refer to the Indo-European
languages of the Indian subcontinent, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Persia
(Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Sinhala, Persian, Pashto, etc.),
although its variant form 'Indo-Iranian' is more common today. The modern
word Iran is a variant of the word Aryan, and the dominant language of
Iran, or Persia, is Farsi, which, like the Pashto of neighboring
Afghanistan, in an Aryan language in the technical and original meaning of
the word.
During the 19th century linguists made important scientific breakthroughs
with respect to understanding the history and evolution of, and
interrelationships between, languages. During the first stage of this work
it was widely believed that Sanskrit was the language from which most of
the languages spoken in Europe had developed. For this reason, the term
Aryan came to be used to refer to all of the languages in Europe that are
currently called "Indo-European". Thus, the Celtic, Romance, Germanic,
Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian languages are
all "Aryan", and their traditional speakers "Aryan peoples" in this older
and no longer current usage of the term.
Nazi racial ideologists used the term Aryan to refer to the the
subgroupings within the "Caucasian" race which are often referred to as
Nordic and East Baltic. Both racial subgroupings tend to have blond hair
and blue or gray eyes, with Nordics being taller, lankier, and more narrow
faced, and East Baltics being shorter, stockier and more round faced.
Although the term has entered popular speech with this meaning, it is
tainted by its racist associations, and many people avoid it for this
reason. It is also quesionable whether there is any real need for a cover
term to refer to an arbitrary subset of two racial subgroupings.
> It is not possible to draw a line anywhere in Europe and say
> that people on this side are Aryan and on the other side are not.
> Also, it is not always possible, for any given individual, to say
> that he is or is not Aryan.
>
> Again, roughly speaking, we can say that it embraces the inhabitants
> of Germany, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, the British Isles, Poland
> and
> the Baltic countries. Most French persons would probably qualify as
> would many persons in Northern Italy. Russians in the Northwestern
> regions
> of that country are predominantly Aryan though the Asiatic admixture
> becomes heavier as one travels Eastward.
The indigenous inhabitants of the British Isles, the Celts, are not Aryan
in the sense of Nazi racial ideology. The same holds true for the
indigenous inhabitants of Scandinavia, the Saami (or Lapps). Both represent
older, and darker subgroupings within the Caucasian racial type, even if
centuries of intermarriage with the more recent Germanic population has
'lightened' many of them up. Many of the lighter people in France trace
their origins to the Franks, an originally Germanic people (comp.
Frankfurt, Franconia), the western brach of which gave up its Germanic
speech for a Romance language. Those in northern Italy trace their racial
characteristics to the Vandals, Longobardians, Gepids, and Goths. All of
these were Germanic tribes that originated in Scandinavia or what are now
northern Germany and Poland. The Goths, about whom we know the most,
gradually raped and pillaged their way southward through Poland, eventually
splitting into western and eastern branches (Visigoths and Ostrogoths)
during a period roughly defined by the final centuries of the Roman Empire
up until the year 1000. The originally Nordic Goths have left their genetic
imprint along an area running from southern France and northern Spain
(Toulouse and Barcelona were both the centers of short-lived Gothic
kingdoms) across southern Europe all the way to the Crimean Peninsula in
Ukraine, where a degenerate form of Ostrogothic was still being spoken in
the 17th century.
Another interesting consequence of these different meanings of "Aryan" is
that the Finns and Estonians, both peoples in which the Eastern-Baltic
racial type predominates, are Aryans in sense of Nazi racial ideology but,
since they continue to speak the old indigenous languages of the
pre-Indo-European population of the region (Finnish, Estonian, and Lappish
are all related and represent a once more widespread group of languages
which trace their roots to northern Eurasia), not otherwise.
Regards,
Eugene Holman
University of Helsinki, Finland
Jerry Abbott
> During the 19th century linguists made important scientific breakthroughs
> with respect to understanding the history and evolution of, and
> interrelationships between, languages. During the first stage of this work
> it was widely believed that Sanskrit was the language from which most of
> the languages spoken in Europe had developed. For this reason, the term
> Aryan came to be used to refer to all of the languages in Europe that are
> currently called "Indo-European". Thus, the Celtic, Romance, Germanic,
> Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian languages are
> all "Aryan", and their traditional speakers "Aryan peoples" in this older
> and no longer current usage of the term.
Aryan has acquired another meaning, however, and that is the meaning
that Richard Phillips stated. As it is commonly used in the USA (I
wouldn't know about elsewhere), Aryan means "belonging to the White
Race" or "relating to the people whose ancestors lived in northern
Europe" or something of the sort.
> Nazi racial ideologists used the term Aryan to refer to the the
> subgroupings within the "Caucasian" race which are often referred to as
> Nordic and East Baltic. Both racial subgroupings tend to have blond hair
> and blue or gray eyes, with Nordics being taller, lankier, and more narrow
> faced, and East Baltics being shorter, stockier and more round faced.
> Although the term has entered popular speech with this meaning, it is
> tainted by its racist associations, and many people avoid it for this
> reason. It is also quesionable whether there is any real need for a cover
> term to refer to an arbitrary subset of two racial subgroupings.
I propose that no one should avoid the use of a word because of its
supposed "racist associations."
> > It is not possible to draw a line anywhere in Europe and say
> > that people on this side are Aryan and on the other side are not.
> > Also, it is not always possible, for any given individual, to say
> > that he is or is not Aryan.
> >
> > Again, roughly speaking, we can say that it embraces the inhabitants
> > of Germany, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, the British Isles, Poland
> > and
> > the Baltic countries. Most French persons would probably qualify as
> > would many persons in Northern Italy. Russians in the Northwestern
> > regions
> > of that country are predominantly Aryan though the Asiatic admixture
> > becomes heavier as one travels Eastward.
>
> The indigenous inhabitants of the British Isles, the Celts, are not Aryan
> in the sense of Nazi racial ideology. The same holds true for the
> indigenous inhabitants of Scandinavia, the Saami (or Lapps). Both represent
> older, and darker subgroupings within the Caucasian racial type, even if
> centuries of intermarriage with the more recent Germanic population has
> 'lightened' many of them up.
The Roman historian Diodorus described the Celts as having clear white
skin. The Celts first appeared historically around 400 BC, arriving in
the Po River valley (northern Italy) from the direction of the Alps
(today what is Switzerland, Austria and maybe southern Germany).
Jerry Abbott
Eugene Holman
In article <33DE8AF6...@ix.netcom.com>, Jerry Abbott
<j...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> I propose that no one should avoid the use of a word because of its
> supposed "racist associations."
>
These "racist associations" are not "supposed", but distressingly genuine,
see below.
As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "Meaning is use". If people agree to use a
word in a certain meaning, that's the meaning the word has or acquires.
This does not, however, negate the fact that the current "popular" meaning
of "Aryan" is imprecise, in conflict with the earlier meanings of the word,
and severely tainted by its origins in Nazi racist ideology.
> >
> > The indigenous inhabitants of the British Isles, the Celts, are not Aryan
> > in the sense of Nazi racial ideology. The same holds true for the
> > indigenous inhabitants of Scandinavia, the Saami (or Lapps). Both represent
> > older, and darker subgroupings within the Caucasian racial type, even if
> > centuries of intermarriage with the more recent Germanic population has
> > 'lightened' many of them up.
>
> The Roman historian Diodorus described the Celts as having clear white
> skin. The Celts first appeared historically around 400 BC, arriving in
> the Po River valley (northern Italy) from the direction of the Alps
> (today what is Switzerland, Austria and maybe southern Germany).
According to Nazi racist ideology white skin wasn't enough. Poles, Czechs,
Celts, Latvians, Lithuanians, Finns, Estonians, Russians, and Hungarians
not to mention German and Eastern European Jews, all tend to have "clear
white skin". That did not suffice to make them "Aryans" as the Nazis
understood the term.
The Nazi race scientists developed a complex system of racial
classification which did not recognize a basic category "White", but rather
used a system based on skin color, skull shape, face shape, face-flatness,
hair color and texture, eye color and shape, nose angle, prominence of
cheek bones, etc. etc. to determine if a person was racially Nordic (=
Aryan), East Baltic, Alpine, Dinaric, etc. Being a Jew, no matter what a
person's physical racial characteristics, was regarded as an overriding
racial(!) defect, for which reason Jews, no matter how they looked, were
non-Aryans by definition. Slavs, in turn, were regarded as essentially
non-Aryan, even if the populations of the borderlands under Czech, Polish,
and Lithuanian control between the Aryan Germanic and non-Aryan Slavic and
Baltic worlds were regarded as containing a high proportion of culturally
and linguistically Slavicized or Balticized Aryans, hence the German
eagerness to kidnap children who seemed Aryan in appearance in conjunction
with their ethnic cleansing of occupied territories:
"Obviously in such a mixture of peoples there will always be some racially
good types. Therefore I think it is our duty to take their children with
us, to remove them from their environment, if necessary by robbing or
stealing them."
- Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, October 1943
Depending on the racial score received by the children swept up in the Nazi
occupation and ethnic cleansing of eastern Europe, the children were:
a) sent to German families to be culturally Aryanized,
b) sent to concentration camps to work as slave laborers, in which capacity
they usually succumbed within a few months to exhaustion, starvation,
and/or disease, or;
c) killed outright in mass shooting operations or extermination camps.
(See: Georg LILIENTHAL, *Der Lebensborn, e.V.*, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1993,
Catarine CLAY & Michael Leapman, *Master Race. The Lebensborn Experiment in
Nazi Germany*, London, 1995, Leon POLIAKOV, *The Aryan Myth, A History of
Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe*, London, 1974, Robert PROCTOR,
*Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis*, Harvard University Press, 1988,
Paul WEINDLING, *Health, Race and German Politics between National
Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945*, Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Hence the problem with the modern popular usage of "Aryan". a tall, blond,
blue-eyed Jew, Pole, or Finn could be called an "Aryan" in popular speech,
but this obviously goes against the original meaning of the term (which
would exclude all of them), the 19th century linguistic meaning (which
would exclude the Finn and possibly the Jew on linguistic and cultural
grounds), and is an insult to historically conscious Jews and Poles, whose
ancestors were being systematically slaughtered by the Nazis slightly more
than half a century ago specifically for the racial "defect" of being
non-Aryans.
But, meaning is use.