In a cultural sense, anyone can be anything, whatever they wish, even if they do trace little or some parts of their lineage to the holder population of that culture. We are arguing for different sides. By your example, I and a random Yemenite person share that common proto-semitic speaking ancestry with each other but that random Yemenite person has much more of that proto-semitic speaking ancestors DNA than I have. I could easily claim that I am "semitic" the same way that random Yemenite person can but it wouldn't be logical or fair would it.
"I could easily claim that I am "semitic""
The thing is though people didnt randomly just call themselves aryans. They been doing it for thousands of years. Even linguists and historians before DNA tests coined us as "aryans". Do you know why?
I dont know about semetic though?
"You seem to give a significant importance to what people claim"
Yes i do, because there didnt exist dna tests like today 100 years ago, while the aryan identity of indics and iranics is more than 2000 years old. People dont randomly make up claims, thats the thing. The ancestors of these indics and iranics been identifying themselves as aryans, and so did their descendants(indics + iranics) for centuries. There were no DNA test to measure "how aryan" anyone were, because if you were an aryan, youre an aryan. ENd of the story
And no, it aint like the fake sayyed claims of south asians, because the fake ones dont have anything to prove their actual sayed ancestry(yes, they made up those claims because of prestige. Aryans today on the other hand literally have very aryan nomadic elements to their ancestrial religions and culture, like using fire for worship, or worshipping the gods of the aryan nomads). The actual ones usually have documentation of their ancestry.
By the way EVEN if we went by dna tests, all/most of these aryans scores aryan haplogroups(well most. Ossetians dont get paternal haplogroups because founder effect, despite being aryans). And they always score some "aryan" ancestry too.
Again, get this:
Aryan identity cant be treated as an ethnicity or like any ethnicities today, since it isnt an ethnicity. Its an identity shared with ALL of the aryan descendants today, no matter the amount of steppe ancestry