According to the OED … and Wikipedia … it comes from Sanskrit “arya” – with a “y”, and that’s the standard spelling in English; Sanskrit is the earliest language of the group, so whatever later sound changes may have occurred in the Persian branch are not terribly relevant (certainly not “more accurate”…though all the talk of modern variants in Wikipedia, Indian and Persian, spell it with a “y” as well, except when transliterating from a Greek transliteration)
Sanskrit is the oldest extant language group but it’s from the Vedic branch, the Arians were their neighbours; furthermore the language has undergone some mutation since it moved into India as it is an artificially constructed and not a vernacular language. It even SAYS SO right in the name, ‘Sansrkit’ means ‘put together, well formed’. Vedics are not Arians; just because they had a tendency to turn an IA into a YA doesn’t mean anything.
Avestan also treats it as Airiiana. Of all the languages Pashto and its derivatives are the closest to actual Arian because Pashto is the language of the Arians. Seriously, they’re Afghans. I am pretty sure the ancient Arians knew better what they were called than their distant cousins who had been living in India for 1000 years. English languages get it from Sanskrit, and it has clearly been corrupted in Sanskrit.
We know where the term Arian originates; the reason it is more accurate in Persian is because they were an Eastern Afghan-Iranian people and not a Western Vedic-Iranian people. The old pre-Farsi and Pashto languages are just as old as Sanskrit and, moreover, was an actual spoken language and not a priestly language. Sanskrit is the ‘Indo’ branch of Indo-Iranian, Arians are from the Iranian side.
And, no, Iranians and Afgans prefer a transliteration closer to ‘Arian’ than ‘Aryan’, and since speakers of Pashto and Farsi outnumber the speakers of Sanskrit by about 100 million that is definitely a majority.
http://www.alibaba.com/member/iranbanaarian.html
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Iranian_Family_Tree_v2.0.png
According to Wikipedia (and offline sources; e.g., The Horse, The Wheel, and Language), the original Aryans were the people who wrote the Rig Veda (it may have indicated a specific tribe in earlier usage)…in Sanskrit. (And Vedic Sanskrit predates Old Persian by about 1000 years; aligns with Proto-Persian)
Wikipedia is wrong. While the conquistadors in India might well have called themselves Aryans, they were doing so as a mutation of the word Arians. Again, ‘Indo-Aryan’ is a nonsensical language group if you treat Sanskrit as definitive. Sanskrit is the oldest living branch, but it is a completely artificial language and from a different branch than Pashto and Farsi languages.
“The point is that speech and writing convey much more than simple words.”
If only you could see what your own writing conveys about you.