SV: Kinship systems

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

> > Aryan vs. Dravidian. In order to keep the discourse on track, may I
>point
> > out that "ethnic" is simply another word that attempts to bring race in,
> > through the back door?
>
>Not necessarily. Greek ethnos means "people", and interestingly, "race"
>originally could mean "people" or "nation", even "family" as well as

Maybe so, but let us leave it for Naga Ganesan to clarify what he means. It
is my contention that people are not necessarily aware of the original
etymologies of the words they use today, as seen in the recent posts about
heresy and Greek heresias. Whatever a word may have originally meant in
Greek or Latin, it comes loaded with more modern meaning when used in
English. I just wanted to point out that the category of Dravidian language
speakers is not equivalent to "ethnic Dravidian stock", whatever that may
mean. It remains to be proved that the people who moved east after the
Sarasvati dried up were either. Needless to say, the same goes for
Indo-Aryan language speakers and "Indo-Aryan ethnic stock" too.

Vidyasankar

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