Re: China: Imperial House, obviously 2007 and recently still living members

On Aug 8, 7:19 pm, Donald4564 <dbi...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The Persians (Iranians) I know dislike the term Iran as it conjures up
the Aryan ideal fostered by the Nazis. I must say though that I am
bewildered as to how Persians (Oranians) could be considered Aryan if
that ideal was in blond, blue eyed and fair skinned persons. Most
Persians (Iranians) that I have seen are dark, olive skinned and
hirsute.

*Sigh*

How many Iranians do you know, I wonder?

Let me explain once again. There is _one_, and only _one_, word for
the country that some in the West call "Persia" in the Persian
language, aka Farsi. That word is _Iran_. There is no alternative.
The same word is used in most of the neighboring languages of the
region.

A very long time ago, the word which became "Iran" was a word meaning
"of the Aryas", "Arya" being the designation of a tribe or nation
whose descendants include people who are now Kurds, Persians, Tajiks,
Baluchis, Pashtuns, and many, many other groups. The identity of that
tribe has nothing whatsoever to do with the false race-propaganda of
the Nazis. The "Aryas" may have included some of the ancestors of the
present-day inhabitants of Pakistan and northern India; they certainly
were not the ancestors of the Germans. The appropriation of the term
to mean "prehistoric speaker of Proto-Indo-European" was a 19th-
century philological mistake, later perverted to other and worse
ends. There is, however, nothing Nazi and nothing racist about the
name "Iran"; it is an old and venerable term for the region roughly
bounded by the Persian Gulf, the Euphrates, the mountains of Armenia
and the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, the Oxus, the Indus, and the
Arabian Sea, within which the majority of inhabitants are speakers of
Iranic languages.

Whether or not the name is suitable for use _in English_ is, I agree,
a matter for English-speakers to decide (and, by the way, most English-
speakers are quite comfortable with "Iran"); but that has nothing to
do with the ignorant traducement of a fine, venerable old name by a
false association with corrupt political ideologies which followed the
name _Iran_ by *thousands* of years.

.

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