Aryan Languages for Non-Aryan Peoples

Well, it's always been assumed that Aryan-speaking peoples of today must be of an Aryan genetical stock, as well. At least, that's the way European Nazi used to think, gathering that simply because Germans speaking an Aryan language, therefore, they are Aryans, no questions asked.

And this is the topic of my today's post. To sum it up: It's wrong to think that you're an Englishman once you've mastered your school English. Because you might be a Chinese, or a Hindu. Speaking one tribe's language does not make you a national of that tribe. Of course! That would be a silly idea.

Anyway, most people when researching their PIE roots and trying to locate their Urheimat always connect paleolinguistical findings with a specific nation wandering /resettling /migration patterns. Such as there are lots of Uralic people around the Urals, and they're still speaking Uralic languages - Komi, Khanty, Mansi ..., and there are people in Central Europe (in Hungary) which also speak a Uralic language - Magyars. Therefore, they assume that today's Magyars are decendants of the olden days Uralic tribes, and their Urheimat is in today's Russia. Well, let me tell you something: It's their language's Urheimat that might be in Russia, but not of their own today's nation.

If French/Creole-speaking people from a Caribbean island start claiming that their Urheimat is in France you would think they're just plain silly. Right! You would say, - well no, guys, your old home is in Africa!

DNA analysis shows that all nations in today's Indostan subcontinent have the same, identical genetical code. That is, they say, there was no invasion of Aryans from the North at all. Ever! And the Aryanism is a specifically Indian, home-grown trait. No place for racism and White man supremacy. OK. I definitely agree with this finding. At the same time I know that my DNA would be different from theirs and closer to some European blood patterns. Puzzle: we all speak Aryan languages, but we are not related by blood to each other?

There is no puzzle in all that if you accept this simple fact - language that you or your people speak is not always your own, it might be foreign, just as well. Like the gods that we worship - they also might be foreign to us historically and culturally. For example - Christianity and Islam. These faiths have long Semitic roots. And they're native to Jews and Arabs, but foreign to Europeans, Africans, and Americans (native Americans, that is).

How come, then, all Europe and half of Asia ended up speaking languages with the same Aryan roots originating from the same PIE language? My answer would be - through thousands upon thousands of years of genocide, invasions, wars, assimilation, and foreign rule. There are two ways to obliterate a nation - kill it completely through genocide (see American Indians history books), or destroy its culture, religion, and language - a more humanistic approach but with possible political consequences. Romans preferred this way, Russians, and Hungarians (Magyars), too. Today's Ukrainians approach this way their Carpato-Ruthenian minority problem - they argue that there is no Ruthenian language, and no Ruthenian nation. They do not practice genocide, instead they work with assimilation methods hoping that in 10-20 years Ruthenians would be obliterated as an independent nation, and would speak only their masters' language - Ukrainian. To tell the truth, Ukrainians are just following what their own previous masters did - Russians and Polish - turn their language into a dialect of their own.

One of the best successful stories of a language assimilated is English. Celtic tribes under their Roman masters were not able to develop their strong national identity and, therefore, were easily overrun by their Anglo-Saxon invaders. Areas beyond Roman territories withstood (Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall). Anglo-Saxons lost their battle to Danes, accepted their rule, and their original Low German language lost most of its L.G. roots and became assimilated, structurally closer to Scandinavian languages, although still keeping its original word stock. (Because both nations belonged to the same family - Germanic?) When it was time for French Normans rule the Britain, the British language kept its grammar but lost the word stock switching to French/Latin of the British new masters. (was it because the invaders and the liberated belonged to different families this time?)

Another success story is about Bulgarian language. An Asian tribe of Bulgars (of unknown to me ethnic origin - were they Turkic, Aryan, Uralic by blood? I don't know) going West eventually settled down where they are now. This area by that time had a substantial Slavic population (the Slavs also were going West following their German neighbors). Since Bulgars were in minority they lost their identity to Slavs although stayed in charge of political matters (compare Vikings in Russia, France, Italy - they all stayed in charge but lost their cultural identity). Now the lands those Slavic-speaking Bulgarians settled down belonged to Greeks, and the Greeks had a lot more weight in everything - Culture, Religion, Finance, Power, et al. Since these two nations belonged to two different families the weaker one had their language assimilated grammatically - Bulgarian Slavic became more Elleinic in its syntax and morphology (acquired articles, lost noun cases, added a few Illiric features common to the area and shared by Albanians, Rumanians, Greeks, and Serbs). However, it kept most of its Slavic word stock (was it because the master language was from a different family, or was there a lot of Slavic support from its neighboring Slavic languages? British was pretty vulnerable and isolated, being a lone L.G. island among Celts, and therefore, might have fallen an easy prey to Danes, then to French) Or is it that a language under assimilation loses its grammar first, and then its word stock? I'll get back to this question sometime later ... {later}

Shifts

Sound shifts are to languages the same as annual rings to the tree stumps. They allow us to see in the past, and make conclusions about dead trees and extinct languages. And based on these observations we can predict possible changes in weather patterns to come, or how the people whose languages we are looking at now, were interacting in their past.

Here's the one well-known shift, actually two of them:

k/g -> j (/ch)
a/e/o -> a

These are typical for the Vedic Sanskrit, as in Parjanas


Gothic fairguni (mountain?)
Hittite Perkunas
Latvian Perkons
Lithuanian Perkunas
Old Norse deity Fjörgunn
Prussian Perkunos
Sanskrit Parjanas
Slavic Perun


Perkunas -> Parjanas since the shift j -> k is impossible (unnatural) we can safely conclude that the Perkunas is the ancient form, closer to PIE than that in Sanskrit. And, therefore, makes it possible to reconstruct some of the Vedas words back to their previous (pre-shift) form.

p -> f is another form modified by shifts: Fjörgunn <- Perkun.


haus (house) <-> xizh{in}(a) [maja]
maus (mouse) <-> mish(a)
aus (out) <-> iz [aiz]

Invisible Links

Since much of the primordial prehistoric connection has been lost or destroyed by faithful and loyal Christians, Communists, unhappy minorities, and just fluid sands of time it is not easy now, therefore, to see what the picture really was like those days, and how we all managed to get there where we all are now.

One of the proven ways is to research and compare traditional conventional sources - tales, rituals, proverbs ... from the original source: prehistoric culture and mythology. Second best path would be to compare language features such as word-building resources (prefixes, infixes, and roots), as well as maintenance words - prepositions, conjunctions, and disjunctions. Well, sure we must not forget some questionable words, as well!