Aryan language is a term not generally used by today's linguists merely for political reasons, but is encountered often in works published in the 19th century and most of the 20th century to mean:
- The Old Persian language
- The Vedic Sanskrit language
- The Proto-Indo-Iranian language
- Any of the Indo-Iranian languages
- In works published in the late 19th century and early 20th century, this term, or the term Proto-Aryan, was sometimes used to describe the Proto-Indo-European language.
- In works published in the late 19th century and early 20th century, this term in the plural was sometimes used as a synonym for the Indo-European languages
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)