I was taught that it was named by Columbus because he thought he was in INDIA. But I heard an Indian Political leader say it was from some tribe’s word meaning “children of the sun” . Any insight?
The Indian Political Leader is in error.
Now, if you’re talking about Asian Indians, that’s different. They were named after the Indus River, and “Indus” (or “Indos”) is the Greek version of “sindhi” (I, think), which just means “river.” So, the “Indus River” (if you trace its roots back far enough) is kinda redundant.
But, IIRC the current thinking is that Columbus didnt really think he was in INDIA. so why would he refer to the natives as “INDIAN”?
the politician was funny, he referred to his people as the INDIAN NATION but the host asked him if that was a derogatory name . But he said no it was just a revisionist attempt to degrade the people with the Columbus link, because it actually came from the mystical name .
I thought Columbus thought he had landed in the (East) Indies, not continental India.
I read (old Just Checking column) that it derives from the expression Columbus used for them, “gente in dios”, or people of god. Presumably this referred to his desire to convert them to Christianity. Which, IIRC, didn’t quite work out, but that’s another GQ.
Here’s some more info (with links) to chew on.
The name India first appeared in that form in ancient Greek. The Greeks got the name from Persian Hind – this shows that the /h/ sound (rough breathing) was being lost from Greek pronunciation at an early date.
The Persian names Hind and Hindu resulted because of a sound shift in Old Persian from /s/ to /h/. The original name in Sanskrit was Sindhu, the name for the Indus river. Note that sindhu has no Indo-European etymology that means ‘river’. The word sindhu came from the name of the Indus river itself, which has the same name as the land it flows through, Sindh.
A Dravidian etymology has been suggested for sindhu: Linguistic archaeology has shown, through analysis of ancient toponyms and hydronyms, that in prehistory the Dravidian languages were spoken all the way north up the western side of India, through Maharashtra and Gujarat into Sindh (and perhaps Afghanistan and Iran as well). The Dravidian language Brahui, still spoken in Baluchistan, is a remnant of the old northern extent of Dravidian.
The Proto-Dravidian root *cintu means ‘date palm’. In modern Tamil the word for date palm is întu (pronounced îndu). Date palms grew in Sindh in ancient times and are still grown there today as a cash crop. I think this etymology looks pretty plausible, given the large number of Dravidian loanwords to early Sanskrit.
The older (somewhat acrimonious) thread is:
Indians? How Come?
The more recent (and better developed) thread is:
Why did Christoper Columbus call them “Indians”?