| Babar (Urdu: بابر ), also variously spelled as Baber, Babur, and Babor is a male given name of Persian origin, generally taken in reference to the Persian babr (Persian: ببر), meaning "tiger". It is the general name of the animal which is adopted in the Arabic. There is a similar name in connotation to the Arabic male given form and generic name of the animal by the name "Nimr" (Arabic: نَمِر namir) which means "yellow-black stripped cat", i.e. "tiger".
The word repeatedly appears in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and was borrowed into the Turkic languages of Central Asia. Thackston argues for an alternate derivation from the PIE word "beaver", pointing to similarities between the pronunciation Bābor and the Russian bobr (бобр, "beaver"). |
