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I've never heard anybody call Indians 'Indo-Europeans' or 'Aryans' who wasn't being ironic/sarcastic.Originally Posted by Shelati
Mingle, you beat me to this thread. I always thought of creating it (a similar thread), because a lot of people seem to ignorantly conflate language family with race.
My thread was going to be controversially titled "South Asians are as Indo-European as Jamaicans", meaning that Jamaicans and as well as Indians both have non-Indo European roots, and are comparable. In other words, ancient Indo-Europeans came from northwest Asia/northeastern Europe and assimilated South Asians and Iranians, mixing with some of them and spreading the IE languages, but not completely supplanting their gene pool, hence why they still look native and non-European. Same thing with Jamaica, which is a much more recent case; The Brits arrived over there, mixed with a few, but the natives are still predominantly Subsaharan in genes. Hence, "south Asians are as Indo-European as Jamaicans".
So, if you want to say Indians and Bangladeshis (who may have some Dravidian in them) are "Indo-European peoples", you can might as well call Subsaharan Jamaicans Indo-Europeans too, no?
As per my post above, are Indians and Bangladeshis Indo-European because they speak an Indo European language? Because ancient Indo-Europeans looked nothing like the modern day Indians and Bangladeshis. But they are still called Indo-European peoples, along with most European peoples. Which is odd as they don't cluster close with Europeans. So if you can call Bangladeshis Indo-European (because they speak an IE language), it won't be so strange to call Jamaicans Germanics. What do Bangladeshis have to do with northeastern Europea (IE urheimat) and what do Jamaicans have to do with ancient Germanic peoples? I kind of get the analogy, as bizarre as it is.
I think the OP is making an analogy as well, and how people can be very technical and hypocritical when it comes to this (race and linguistics).
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