Scholarship Regarding The Aryan Race;
Scholarship
19th and early 20th century
The term 'Aryan' was initially introduced into the English language
through works of comparative philology, as a modern rendering of the
Sanskrit word ā́rya. First translated as 'noble' in William Jones' 1794
translation of the Laws of Manu , early-19th-century scholars later
noticed that the term was used in the earliest Vedas as an
ethnocultural self-designation "comprising the worshipers of the gods
of the Brahmans".[79][18] This interpretation was simultaneously
influenced by the presence of the word Ἀριάνης (Ancient Greek)
~ Arianes (Latin) in classical texts, which had been rightly compared
by Anquetil-Duperron in 1771 to the Iranian airya (Avestan) ~ ariya (Old
Persian), a self-identifier used by the speakers of Iranian
languages since ancient times. Accordingly, the term 'Aryan' came to
refer in scholarship to the Indo-Iranian languages, and, by extension, to
the native speakers of the Proto-Indo-Iranian language, the
prehistoric Indo-Iranian peoples.[84]
During the 19th century, through the works of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–
1829), Christian Lassen (1800–1876), Adolphe Pictet (1799–1875),
and Max Müller (1823–1900), the terms Aryans , Arier , and Aryens came
to be adopted by a number of Western scholars as a synonym of
'(Proto-)Indo-Europeans'.[85] Many of them indeed believed
that Aryan was also the original self-designation used by the prehistoric
speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language, based on the erroneous
assumptions that Sanskrit was the oldest Indo-European language and
on the linguistically untenable position that Ériu (Ireland) was related
to Arya .[86] This hypothesis has since been abandoned in scholarship