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( Aryan)
Aryan is an English word derived from the Sanskrit "Arya" meaning "noble" or "honorable".[1][2] The Avestan cognate is "Airya" and the Old Persian equivalent is "Ariya". It is widely held to have been used as an ethnic self-designation of the Proto-Indo-Iranians. Since, in the 19th century, the Indo-Iranians were the most ancient known speakers of Indo-European languages, the word Aryan was adopted to refer not only to the Indo-Iranian people, but also to Indo-European speakers as a whole. In Europe, the concept of an Aryan race became influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as linguists and ethnologists argued that speakers of these Indo-European languages constitute a distinctive race, descended from an ancient people, who were referred to as the "primitive Aryans", but are now known as Proto-Indo-Europeans. In linguistics, Aryan is most often used in the context of the sub-branch of Indo-Iranian languages referred to as Indo-Aryan languages. The adjective *aryo- was suggested as ascending to Proto-Indo-European times as the self-designation of the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language itself. It was suggested that other words such as Éire, the Irish name of Ireland, and Ehre (German for "honour") were related to it, but these are now widely regarded as untenable,[3] and while *ar-yo- is certainly a well-formed PIE adjective, there is no evidence that it was used as an ethnic self-designation outside the Indo-Iranian branch. In the 1850s Max Müller theorized that the word originated as a denotation of farming populations, since he thought it likely that it was related to the root *arh3, meaning "to plough". Other 19th century writers, such as Charles Morris, repeated this idea, linking the expansion of PIE speakers to the spread of agriculturalists. Most linguists now consider *arh3 to be unrelated.
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