152 karma · joined September 26, 2015
This is how you spell achar in Persian, اچار. Find me a dictionary that has an entry for this word. You'll find it in Urdu dictionaries (same spelling), but not Persian, even Afghani Persian, which is much closer to Urdu. You know why that is? It's because achar is NOT a modern Persian word. And by modern I mean last 1000 years or so. It couldn't have been a Persian loan word because there are absolutely no references to it in Persian, at least in the last 1000 years. There's no credible evidence at all to that claim. Just some blog articles and non-experts parroting the same claim with zero knowledge of Persian or even most Indian languages.
As to the real etymology. I don't know man, not easy to find. You can Google Ayurveda and achar, that's all I got. Can't find the original Ayurvedic sources either. You sound like you know some vedas and Sanskrit. Would be great if you can lookup what pickles are called in Ayurveda. In the modern lingo, Ayurvedic pickles are also called achar. And Ayurveda products usually keep their original naming. I don't know of any example where they prefer a colloquial word over an Ayurvedic word. So they calling it achar seems to me that the word predates Ayurveda.
You're right, I couldn't find references to achar in Vedic Sanskrit or Avestan. So it's probably not that old. Although, it could be that those texts didn't bother writing about everyday things like pickles. If those texts mention pickles, but use a different word than achar, then one can claim that pickle wasn't called achar.
I couldn't find the etymology for achar, but I found references to classical Persian (Avestan) and Proto-Indo-Iranian. Apparently Ayurveda mentions achar, so it's possible that at some point there was a distinction between medicinal pickles and popular everyday pickles.
Nobody knows of course, but to me it's likely that achar has ancient origins, possibly in old Indus Valley or Gangetic Plains. In either case, history of pickle in Indian subcontinent and words used to describe isn't as simple as a loan word.
Cool! What are you doing with climate?
The OP is right that in the long run science is self-correcting by its very nature. Over those timescales, half a generation or so only the good stuff stands the test of time. But over short timescales bad science making its way out into the world can wreak havok.
You could call Rudra/Shiva as modern versions of that motif. But calling the figure in Pashupati seal as depecting a Hindu deity is probably not correct. IVC was pre-vedic after all. No doubt later cultures adopted IVC deities into their own pantheon. But IVC religion was likely very far from what we recognize as Hinduism. And probably closer to religions in Mesopotamia at the time. Egypt does seem further culturally than Mesopotamia to me though. So I find the Egyptian connection a bit tenuous as well.