Aryan
American Heritage Dictionary:
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Ar·y·an
(âr'ē-ən, ăr'-) 
n.
n.
- Indo-Iranian. No longer in technical use.
- A member of the people who spoke the parent language of the Indo-European languages. No longer in technical use.
- A member of any people speaking an Indo-European language. No longer in technical use.
- In Nazism and neo-Nazism, a non-Jewish Caucasian, especially one of Nordic type, supposed to be part of a master race.
[From Sanskrit ārya-, noble, Aryan.]
Aryan Ar'y·an adj.WORD HISTORY It is one of the ironies of history that Aryan, a word nowadays referring to the blond-haired, blue-eyed physical ideal of Nazi Germany, originally referred to a people who looked vastly different. Its history starts with the ancient Indo-Iranians, Indo-European peoples who inhabited parts of what are now Iran, Afghanistan, and India. Their tribal self-designation was a word reconstructed as *arya- or *ārya-. The first of these is the form found in Iranian, as ultimately in the name of Iran itself (from Middle Persian Ērān (šahr), "(Land) of the Iranians," from the genitive plural of Ēr, "Iranian"). The variant *ārya- is found unchanged in Sanskrit, where it referred to the upper crust of ancient Indian society. These words became known to European scholars in the 18th century. The shifting of meaning that eventually led to the present-day sense started in the 1830s, when Friedrich Schlegel, a German scholar who was an important early Indo-Europeanist, came up with a theory that linked the Indo-Iranian words with the German word Ehre, "honor," and older Germanic names containing the element ario-, such as the Swiss warrior Ariovistus who was written about by Julius Caesar. Schlegel theorized that far from being just a designation of the Indo-Iranians, the word *arya- had in fact been what the Indo-Europeans called themselves, meaning something like "the honorable people." (This theory has since been called into question.) Thus "Aryan" came to be synonymous with "Indo-European," and in this sense entered the general scholarly consciousness of the day. Not much later, it was proposed that the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans had been in northern Europe. From this theory, it was but a small leap to think of the Aryans as having had a northern European physiotype. While these theories were playing themselves out, certain anti-Semitic scholars in Germany took to viewing the Jews in Germany as the main non-Aryan people because of their Semitic roots; a distinction thus arose in their minds between Jews and the "true Aryan" Germans, a distinction that later furnished unfortunate fodder for the racial theories of the Nazis.
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Name formerly given to prehistoric people who settled in ancient Iran and the northern Indian subcontinent. Their language is believed to have influenced the Indo-European languages of South Asia. In the 19th century there arose a notion, propagated by the count de Gobineau and later by his disciple Houston Stewart Chamberlain, of an Aryan race: people who spoke Indo-European, especially Germanic, languages and lived in northern Europe. The Aryan race was considered to be superior to all other peoples. Although this notion was repudiated by numerous scholars, including Franz Boas, the notion was seized on by Adolf Hitler and was made the basis of the Nazi policy of exterminating Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and other non-Aryans. racism.
For more information on Aryan, visit Britannica.com.
from Sanskrit
This word originated in India
Despite the propaganda of Adolf Hitler and the posturing of white supremacist groups in the United States, the true Aryan nation is to be found not in the woods of Idaho but in the words of ancient India.
Aryan comes from Sanskrit, the sacred and carefully preserved language of the Vedas, the oldest scriptures of Hinduism. Arya, the Sanskrit word, is not a racial designation but a term of respect, meaning "excellent, worthy, honorable, noble" or "lord, master, friend." Before a person's name it is used like "Sir," as in Aryaputra or Aryakanya.
Sanskrit is of great interest to linguists and historians, because it is the oldest preserved language of the Indo-European family. It is now thought to date back at least six thousand years. A word similar to Aryan is found in other Indo-European languages; from it developed Persia's modern name, Iran. Following this clue, linguists in the nineteenth century decided that the noble name Aryan was probably what the original Indo-Europeans called themselves before they split into different tribes speaking different languages. They also used Aryan to designate the branch of Indo-European that we now call Indo-Aryan. In English these usages appear as early as 1839.
In the twentieth century, the Nazis applied the designation Aryan to their own "race" far to the north and west of the original Aryans. As the century ended, certain spiritual descendants of the Nazis continued that tradition, calling themselves the Aryan Nations. Their leader, Pastor Richard G. Butler of California, declared that "the true, literal children of the Bible are the twelve tribes of Israel, now scattered throughout the world and now known as the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Teutonic, Scandinavian, Celtic peoples of the earth," proclaiming them "the Aryan Race, the true Israel of the Bible." There is just one problem with this: the word Aryan never appears in the Bible. And Pastor Butler makes no mention of the Vedas.
No one today speaks Sanskrit as a native language, but many people learn it for religious, historical, or linguistic purposes. A 1961 census of India counted nearly 200,000 speakers of Sanskrit as a second language. Many words of modern Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi and Urdu can be traced back to Sanskrit, so it is the ultimate origin for words like Hindi guru, Gujarati banyan, and Bengali jute.
Columbia Encyclopedia:
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Aryan
Aryan (âr'ēən), [Sanskrit,=noble], term formerly used to designate the Indo-European race or language family or its Indo-Iranian subgroup. Originally a group of nomadic tribes, the Aryans were part of a great migratory movement that spread in successive waves from S Russia and Turkistan during the 2d millennium B.C. Throughout Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, literate urban centers fell to their warrior bands. Archaeological evidence corroborates the text of the Veda by placing the invasion of India by the Aryans at c.1500 B.C. They colonized the Punjab region of NW India and absorbed much of the indigenous culture. The resulting Indo-Aryan period saw the flourishing of a pastoral-agricultural economy that utilized bronze objects and horse-drawn chariots. Before the discovery of the Indus valley sites in the 1920s, Hindu culture had been attributed solely to the Aryan invaders. The idealization of conquest pictured in the Vedic hymns was incorporated into Nazi racist literature, in which German descent was supposedly traced back to Aryan forebears.
Translations:
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Aryan
Dansk (Danish)
n. - arier
adj. - arisk
Français (French)
n. - Arien
adj. - arien
Deutsch (German)
n. - Arier, Indogermane
adj. - arisch, indogermanisch
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - 'Αριος, Ινδοευρωπαίος
adj. - άριος, ινδοευρωπαϊκός
Português (Portuguese)
n. - ariano (m)
adj. - ariano
Русский (Russian)
ариец, арийка, арийский
Español (Spanish)
n. - ario
adj. - ario, de raza aria
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - arier
adj. - arisk
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
印欧语, 印欧语系的人, 雅利安人, 印欧语系的, 雅利安语系的
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 印歐語, 印歐語系的人, 雅利安人
adj. - 印歐語系的, 雅利安語系的
한국어 (Korean)
n. - 아리아인[어], 인도 유럽계 인종
adj. - 아리아인[어]의, 비 유대인의
日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 先史アーリア人, アーリア語, アーリア人
adj. - アーリア人の, アーリア語の
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - דובר לשון הודו-אירופית, אם הלשונות ההודו-אירופיות, (גזע) ארי
adj. - הודו-אירופי, של הארים
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American Heritage Dictionary
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 1994-2012 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
Houghton Mifflin's International Word Origins
The World in So Many Words, by Allan A. Metcalf. Copyright © 1999 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Columbia Encyclopedia
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.
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