אשר

Hebrew edit

From Proto-Semitic *ʔaṯar-. Cognate to Arabic أَثَر (ʔaṯar, “trace, vestige, impression, relic”) and Ge'ez አሰር (ʾäsär), አሠር (ʾäśär, “trace, vestige; way, road; relic”), more closely Aramaic אַתְרָא / ܐܰܬܪܳܐ (ʾaṯrā), absolute state אֲתַר (ʾăṯar), אָתַר (ʾaṯar) / ܐܰܬܰܪ (ʾaṯar, “spot, place”), doublet of אֲתָר (ʾăṯār, “spot, place”) borrowed from it,^[1] related also to the verb אָשַׁר (ʾāšár, “to go straight on, to make progress”).^[2]

אֲשֶׁר • ('ashér)

This conjunction is somewhat archaic, but still sees use in formal writing. Its less formal counterpart is שֶׁ־ (she-).
אֲשֶׁר as a conjunction is a relativizer, which is something Standard English doesn't have. It functions somewhat like a relative pronoun, but an additional pronoun (called a resumptive pronoun) remains inside the relative clause. This can happen in English as well, when the internal structure of the clause prevents the internal pronoun from being dropped, but whereas in English it's somewhat rare and normally considered an error, in Hebrew it's quite common and quite standard. Specifically, in Hebrew the internal pronoun cannot be dropped when it's the object of a preposition.

אֲשֶׁר • ('ashér)

This pronoun is somewhat archaic, but still sees use in formal writing. Its less formal counterpart is שֶׁ־ (she-).
As noted above, אֲשֶׁר serves in some cases as a conjunction rather than as a pronoun.

Root
א־שׁ־ר (ʾ-š-r)

אָשֵׁר • ('ashér) m

אֹשֶׁר • ('ósher) m

אִשֵּׁר • ('ishér) third-singular masculine past (pi'el construction)

אֻשַּׁר • (ushár) third-singular masculine past (pu'al construction)

^ Nöldeke, Theodor (1895) “Über einen arabischen Dialect”, in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes‎^[1] (in German), volume 9, page 11 footnote 1
^ Dillmann, August (1865) “አሠር”, in Lexicon linguae aethiopicae cum indice latino (in Latin), Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, column 739