On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Ulhas Joglekar wrote:
> But what justifies use of one name "Aryan" for a large group of people
> is a common family of languages, viz. Indo-European group of languages.
> Sanskrit, Latin and Greek were Aryan languages.
Aryan comes from the same roots as Iranian, whence the original migration was thought to have started when this theory originated in the late 18C early 19C. (Some theorists still believe it originated there, but it's controversial.)
The Indo-European language group was originally called the Indo-Aryan language group until that term got indeligibly soiled. The term Aryan still used in an Indian context, but in prehistoric European studies, we tend to speak about the "proto-indo-European-speaking peoples." Same peoples, though.
The original excitement about the Indo-European hypothesis was not only that the languages of the Indian subcontinent and Europe were related, but that, since languages in illiterate cultures tend to differentiate fairly rapidly over large areas or over long period of time, the high degree of similarity from one end of this huge area to the other implied strongly that all these languges had evolved from a similar language -- now dubbed proto-indo-European -- that had developed into a confined space and had then dispersed rapidly throughout the entire region. Hence the presumed invasion as the only thing that could be that quick. How compact the original area was and where it was located has been controversial ever since, as well as what happened after the invasion. In lots of places, proto-indo-European speakers seem to have adopted or absorbed the local customs and mythology even if their language remained the dominant one.
All that awful muck about the "aryan master race" has its roots in the indo-european hypothesis. But even though that is all wrong and evil, underneath it is still interesting stuff.
Michael