Comments by "Peter Lund" (@peterfireflylund) on "Epimetheus" channel.

  1. You are being too nice to those silly Indian Nationalists. Far too nice.
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  2. Why on Earth should I care about that? (And, no, you probably don't know your own history well. Very few people do, no matter where in the world they live. A country's history as taught in schools and talked about in the media is usually a load of chauvinist bullshit -- Western nations are certainly no exception to that. The best way to escape from that is to spend some quality time at a good university library and read foreign books about one's own history. Preferably even in foreign languages.)
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  3. You are right, I am not Aryan. I'm from the European branch of the Indo-European family tree. (Aryan is the same word is Iran. Farsi/Dari and Hindi/Urdu/etc are quite close to each other.) You seem to think you have delivered an effective insult for some reason...?
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  4. There is plenty of evidence -- DNA, archaeology, culture, and linguistics. On the other side there is only old habits ("I was taught in school that...x, y, and z !") and cultural chauvinism.
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  5. > if it came from outside why there is not any trace of Sanskrit in other countries? The precursor to Sanskrit did. Look up Farsi/Dari -- indeed the whole Indo-Aryan group of languages that I referred to earlier. That precursor is related to the precursors to modern European languages (except of course Basque, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Sami, ...). In fact, they all have a common precursor that we call Proto-Indo-European. Do you believe our entire current understanding of historical linguistics for our own languages was invented back in the 19th century in order to mislead a bunch of Indians? Do you really believe that all the continental European countries would just accept that? Do you really believe all the German linguists would conduct research into Indoeuropean language laws and grammar -- fake Indoeuropean language laws and grammar, according to you -- just to please the *British*? If so, then you must really have high thoughts of your own importance ;)
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  6. > divide Indians along regional and caste lines by misinterpriting Sanskrit verses in religious texts . Castes existed looong before the British. DNA analysis indicates that the Indian castes were largely reproductively isolated from each other for a long time -- probably about 2-3000 years. (On the other hand there is some flexibility in the castes -- new subcastes appear and disappear over small timescales. That doesn't mean that there is all that much mixing of Brahmin and Dalit genes -- and what there is is probably more in one direction than in the other.)
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  7. Who on Earth said that they were white European? Nobody did :) Hindi, Gujarati, and the other modern Northern Indian languages are derived from Sanskrit -- or rather, the kind of Sanskrit that common people spoke and not so much the highly standardized formal form of Sanskrit that Pāṇini described/invented. This is no different than how French/Spanish/Italian/Romanian are derived more from the common man's vulgar Latin than from the highly standardized prestige form of Latin that Cicero and Caesar wrote in. So where did Sanskrit come from? Was it invented one afternoon around teatime? Was it a purely Indian invention that took place in India? No. The predecessor to Sanskrit was brought into India from the North West -- and it was very similar to the language that evolved to become Persian. The common ancestor to that -- and to languages like Latin, Greek, Albanian (all very different and separated for thousands of years) and the Germanic and Slavic languages came (roughly) from an area in South-East Ukraine and a bit further East from that (the Pontic steppes). Nobody is saying that Europeans invaded India. Nobody -- except bonkers Indian nationalists -- is saying that Indians invaded Europe. What they are saying is that lots places were invaded by a people that originally (as far back as we know) came from the Pontic steppes. This was pretty obvious a long time ago just from archeology and linguistics -- and the way people looked. Shared elements in mythologies and religions also strengthened the hypothesis. We didn't know exactly where the original home of the protoindoeuropeans was but the Pontic steppes were always one of the leading candidates. Now we have even more confirmation of all this through the use of ancient DNA -- they literally look at tiny pieces of DNA in tiny bits of old skeletons and compare them! How cool is that? These (rather brutal and nasty) guys were our common ancestors, unless you are entirely Dravidian, in which case it is only large parts of your culture that came from them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamna_culture Btw, we have lots of really, really, really old Indo-European writing -- not just in (old!) Latin or (even older) Greek. We also have some so old that it predates not only the Latin, Greek, and the Brahmic script. It is so old that it even predates Linear B! It is written in cuneiform on clay tablets + we have toponyms, personal names, and loanwords in writing in non-Indo-European languages that are even older. We really have a lot of material to base the Indo-European hypothesis on. We don't know whether the Indus valley civilization crashed because of the, let's face it, barbarian Aryan invasion(s) or whether the Aryan invasion(s) were made possible because of the crash of Indus valley civilization. All we really know for sure is that there is a curious coincidence in the timelines. Northern Europe was not well developed during the time of the Indus valley civilization. The Hittites and Luwians seem to have been quite advanced, though.
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  8. Does Singh mean idiot or is it Prit?
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  9. I am not British (or French or German). I am also not a Christian -- I don't believe in fairytales whether they are Hindu, Greek, Norse, or Abrahamic. I am white, though, as if that would make any difference to the DNA sequenced from ancient skeletons found in the Indus Valley or to Indo-European linguistics.
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  10. I am as white as can be. I am from Scandinavia and I'm even a bit taller than average here. Nobody would mistake me for a Pakistani :) I don't believe in fairy tales or invisible sky friends -- not even if they are blue elephants. I do agree with you about the Pedophete, one of the nastiest human beings ever on this planet. That is, if he ever actually existed. He is most likely a construction.
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  11. Raj, oh, I know :) I've met some really great Indians (although not many find their way up to Copenhagen). I've met this TV celebrity's dad a couple of times (because he had a desk next to my dad's): https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divya_Das (Never met her, though.) The dad did have a mild Indian accent -- who wouldn't? -- but his written Danish was not just flawless but really good. I also met a great guy from Goa. And I had a girlfriend from a Parsi family who was born in Bombay. She openly told me how much better she was treated in India because of her light skin, btw, something which I find really weird. I do realize that the Goan and the Parsi had a very different upbringing from that of most Indians. She grew up with country clubs, for example. One of the reasons why I find (Greater) India fascinating is that there clearly is a great deal of shared history and culture but the differences and distances are still huge. I mean, is it even really a country? I am not saying this to put anybody down, I am saying it because I think the same thing about Europe and the EU. Both are huge constructions that are partly real and grounded in history and the feelings of people and partly quite artificial and new. I have come to the tentative conclusion that if India is a country then so is the EU -- but I am not really sure India is a country.
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  12.  @prabhatchauhan1  We have linguistic evidence, archaeological evidence, and genetic evidence in favour. Against, we only have nationalistic nonsense. Sorry, but that's the way it is. And I do know that versions of the Aryan Invasion theory have been and still are abused for other nationalistic nonsensical reasons.... but that doesn't change the fact that all the evidence is in favour of it. And "Lund" means "small forest"...
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  13. Prabhat Chauhan Actually, your English kinda sucks ;) Sanskrit is an Indo-Aryan language like many others. There are in fact Indo-Aryan writing from outside of India before there is any in India. Sanskrit developed in North-West India/Pakistan and maybe Afghanistan... from existing Indo-Aryan, that was brought into the area by migrants. Sanskrit is definitely on my list of languages to learn but I’m currently too busy with Chinese. I’ll get around to it, though, because it really is an interesting language.
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  14. Prabhat Chauhan ... you are not particularly good at reading, are you? Sanskrit is Indian. It is one of many Indo-Aryan languages. We have Indo-Aryan writing from outside India before there was any Sanskrit inside India. I don’t think I can make it any clearer than that. This is not the first, second, or third time I have written this here. Btw, as I have also written here before, I am not a Christian as I am not superstitious in the slightest. As I also just wrote to you, I do want to learn Sanskrit some day because it is an interesting language. Furthermore, I am currently learning Chinese. Does that really sound like things a white supremacist would do? I would not, however, waste much time on the Vedas... I would be reading Panini!
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