Talk:ببر

ببر: which language is it really inherited in?

The Persian asserts

From Proto-Indo-Iranian *wy(H)āgʰras. Cognate with Sanskrit व्याघ्र (vyāghrá) and related to Old Armenian վագր (vagr) and Old Georgian ვიგრი (vigri) (both loanwords from Iranian).

and the Arabic

From Proto-Semitic *barbar- (“wolf; jackal”). Cognate to Akkadian 𒌨𒁇𒊏 (barbaru, “wolf”).

Which of these is it really? If actually both, then surely one was at least formally or semantically influenced by the other, and this should be noted too. 4pq1injbok 17:00, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

I don't know for sure, but the etymology from Proto-Indo-Iranian looks suspicious to me. AFAIK, gh never becomes b in Persian. I think the Persian is more likely to be a loanword from Arabic. But I don't have any sources to confirm that suspicion. —Angr 12:07, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Incidentally, our entry [[Viagra]] redlinks to [[व्याघ्रः]], while [[व्याघ्र]] is a bluelink: something needs fixing.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:34, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Both व्याघ्रः and व्याघ्र are correct. The two dots (visarga) are the suffix -h, which is a case ending that marks the nominative singular. But since it is an inflexional suffix, it is often left off of the citation form. So it is a question of which spelling to use as the citation form. I don’t think anybody has written a policy on this, but generally we have not been using it in the lemma, but only in the declension table. Changed mention in Viagra to व्याघ्र. —Stephen ^(Talk) 20:28, 5 January 2011 (UTC)