Iran=Aryan=Nazi?

Cultural influences, Vivek? So you're telling us that the cultural influence of India was so strong that people as far away as Ireland forgot their own languages and took up languages derived from Sanskrit? You don't think that this is far-fetched?

Vivek, I suggest you learn a little bit about general linguistics. Yes, English is important now and serves as a lingua franca. Lots of languages are borrowing from it. But the extent of the borrowing is limited to specialized words related to technology, business and entertainment. One has to look at words that are used all the time, such as mother/father, numbers, verbs like eating, walking, body parts such as head or hand. These are the core words upon which linguists base their assesment upon whether languages are related, because they very seldom are replaced in a language and if one finds languages with these words sharing a root, then those languages are likely related.

Let's look at Latin, as an example. The Romance languages of Europe (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanche and Provencal) are all descended from it, in the same way that Hindi or Bengali are descended from Sanskrit. Many other European languages have also been influenced by Latin (because it was the language of the Church and of intellectual activity for more than 1000 years), but the extent of the borrowing is limited to outside the core words. Thus, even if English has about 50% of its words derived from Latin (often via French), its core words are Germanic, so it is considered a Germanic language. In English one still says head, not testa, one says hand not mano, one says son not fili, and so on. Whatever the intense radiating power of Latin was upon Germanic languages (and we're talking about 600 years side by side, and then an additional 1000 years of Latin being the language of learning), it still has not managed to modify these core words. So, if 1600 years of intense, very up-close cultural radiation from Latin has still not managed to change the core of Germanic languages, how could Sanskrit change all European languages through cultural radiation at such a distance?

So what I'm trying to say is that cultural radiating power can never fully explain the fact that Indian, Iranian and European languages are related, so that core words are often similar. Something more had to occur, and as far as we know, the only thing that would account for it is a common origin for these languages. Given the very wide spread of these languages, the next conclusion is that a migration and probable conquest must have occured from the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans, for them to have spread over such a huge area. The original homeland could have never been as big as the extent of these languages is now, because languages quickly change, and we wouldn't notice such similarities. Now, this may have been manipulated by 19th century European historians, but it doesn't change the fact that there is no other explanation than a common origin for these languages, and hence there must have been a migration in the past. Whether the Indo-Europeans were conquerors or simply overwhelming migrants is another discussion.

Linguists have analyzed the preserved common words of Indo-European languages relating to geography, animals and plants. The idea is that these words can tell us what the characteristics of the Indo-European original homeland were. To give you an example, if these people had never seen a desert or a leopard, then they wouldn't have a word for it. So by process of elimination, based on these common words, linguists have determined that the original homeland must have been in some area which is mostly plains, is temperate and is near a sea (among other characteristics). Further examination has determined that this homeland must have been either to the north of the Black Sea, somewhere around the Caspian Sea or in Anatolia. This happened to play quite well in the hands of racist historians, because it meant that there was a good likelyhood that the original Indo-Europeans were white. But the fact that these historians were racist does not automatically place the location of that homeland somewhere else, does it now?

As far as the "Arya", doesn't that simply mean noble? In Greek as well (another Indo-European language), the word for noble is "arista": hence the word aristocrat in many European languages today.

I think the problem LaGolf may be having is that some Iranians outside Iran, a small minority among Persian non-Muslim community, they see Islam as terrible, Arabs and Jews as Evil, they think they're Aryan's so this make's them buddies with the white folk they now live with in addition to this White Supremacist Groups keen to exploit every avenue have been trying to feed this propoganda.

However, LaGolf I'd like to point out that this tiny minute group of ignorant people do not represent Iran, they don't even have a movement or voice in Iran, they are nothing to do with Iranians or Iran, don't take them seriously I doubt whether there actually Iranian at all.