Who Were The Real Aryans Before The Name Got Co-Opted By Racists?

[wnylib]

3. Aryans were not the "brown skinned" people of India.

They were from what is now called Iran. Aryans is the term given to them by the brown people of India.

The language family that we now call Indo-European used to be called Indo-Aryan. Germanic languages are part of the Indo-European linguistic group. Therefore, Germans claimed to be direct biological descendants of the "original white people."

But of course, language does not equal biology. Look at how many people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds spoke Latin at the time of the Roman Empire. Latin is one of the Indo-European languages. Look at how many people in various parts of the world speak English today, which is also an Indo-European language (a subset of Germanic languages).

The linguistic similarities between extinct Latin and Sanskrit (extinct language of India) had just recently been studied and publicized when Hitler chose Aryan for the designation of a "super race." He mistakenly believed that, since the I-E language family covered such a large area, it indicated a huge ancient white empire that spawned later white empires like Rome. Most (but not all) modern European languages are either Latin based or Germanic. Therefore, the supposed superiority of fascist Italians and Nazi Germans.