# Origin of Hebrew מַר



## Michael Zwingli

From the third century BCE onward, many of the Jewish Exilarchs had what seems to be the title *מַר* prefixed to their names. Examples include: *Nathan Ukban III* of the second century CE called "Mar Ukban", *Mar Zutra I* of the fifth century CE, and *Mar Zutra II* of the sixth century CE. I believe this apparent title to be the same term as modern Hebrew *מַר*, (mar), "Mister" (nominatively)/"sir" (accusatively), but with an older meaning of "Master" (there is a similar but little known relationship between English "master"/"Master" and "Mister"). Am I correct in this?

What I am ultimately wondering about this term, is whether it is derived from a Proto-Semitic _**mar*_ which had the meaning of "man"/"human being" long before the term *אָדָם* was derived from *אֲדָמָה* within Hebrew (and then being borrowed into Arabic). Might such a "Proto-" term have represented the original Semitic word for "man" in the sense of "human being", in the ancestor language of Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic? I note that there seem to be evidences of this in Classical Syriac wherein *ܡܪܐ  *(mārā) meant "lord", "master"; "owner", and within Arabic where *مَار* (mār) means "Lord" or "Saint", with a particular religious connotation.

Further, (and going, quite hypothetically, "way out on a limb") might said hypothetical Proto-Semitic _**mar* _along with Latin *mas* "man" (itself hypothetically deriving from Proto-Indo-European **meryo,* "young man"/"suitor") be seen as deriving from an older Mediterranean/Levantine substrate word for "man", "human being"?

Thank you in advance!


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## Drink

Both Arabic مار and Hebrew מר are _borrowed_ from Aramaic. The Aramaic is actually a shortened form of mārē/māryā (basically, first the emphatic form māryā lost the "y" and became mārā, then the absolute and construct form mārē was modified to mār/mar by analogy to the emphatic form).

Aramaic māryā/mārē comes from the Proto-Semitic root m-r-’ and is cognate with Arabic امرؤ imru’un "man" and Akkadian mārum "son". So yes, perhaps the Proto-Semitic word meant "man", but its form was certainly NOT *mar.


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## Michael Zwingli

Thank you, Drink. A shame that we have lost Aramaic to the encroachments of Arabic. I value cultural diversity highly, especially linguistic diversity, and things like that make me feel badly. Think of the cultural value that we lose when we lose a language... (as distinctive as Hiberno-English is, the Irish must fight for Gaelic) Some languages, English and Arabic being two of them, simply have an outsized presence on our planet, IMO.


Drink said:


> Aramaic māryā/mārē comes from the Proto-Semitic root m-r-’ and is cognate with Arabic امرؤ imru’un "man" and Akkadian mārum "son".


Ah, thanks for that. Good to have the benefit of pros like yourself in these discussions. I find the similarity between hypothesized Indo-European _*meryo_ and Aramaic _māryā_ (in particular) intriguing. Since there seems to be a verified Semitic root for the Aramaic, does this by any chance, remotely suggest to you a borrowing into early Indo European of the Semitic term, or does that represent a leap which a linguist cannot make?


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## elroy

Michael Zwingli said:


> A shame that we have lost Aramaic to the encroachments of Arabic.


This statement is both disrespectful and linguistically inaccurate.  Please do your research before making such dismissive comments out of hand.


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## love-Liebe-Lub(Arbc)

Michael Zwingli said:


> Thank you, Drink. A shame that we have lost Aramaic to the encroachments of Arabic.


Arabic has existed in that region as far the as the history can be stretched, and if anything would be hypothesized, Arabic is the linguistic intelligible continuation of the proto-central semitic language from which Hebrew and Aramaic sprung out, so the "encroachments" hypothesis is rather a weak stance.

but by "encroachments" it seems that you mix political dominance(which make the language used more) with people genocide ( which make the language used more), so the confusion seem to be due to these 2 reasons:
1_up to the middle of 20th century, for the west, to expand territories is also to plan to end people existence and languages.
2_While the idea to force people to islam or even to end their language let alone their existence, for Arabs, was considered inhumane 1500 years ago.


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## Michael Zwingli

love-Liebe-Lub(Arbc) said:


> ...up to the middle of 20th century, for the west, to expand territories is also to plan to end people existence and languages.


Yes, you speak an unfortunate and shameful truth. This is the history of the United States in a nutshell, I am ashamed to say, wherein several hundred distinct cultures descended from Tungusic speaking migrants during the last glaciation were, for all practical purposes, eradicated. Is this the inevitable result of the interaction of politics and culture? 

Even so, the spread of Arabic as a spoken daily language, however that occurred, has resulted in the diminishment or destruction of not only Aramaic as a spoken tongue, but also many dialects of Berber, and has altered Kurdish and Farsi to the extent that they are barely recognizanle as Indo-European languages, would you not say? Because it rather faithfully reflects Proto-Semitic, especially phonetically, Arabic seems to me a very important language to  humankind. This even moreso because of a basic fact, that of all the Semitic languages which might have existed today, there are but two, the rest having been subsumed. I wish that we human beings would learn to value cultural diversity more, to view one another's cultures as an essential part of our own human cultural heritage. Anyways, I do...


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## elroy

Michael Zwingli said:


> the spread of Arabic as a spoken daily language, however that occurred, has resulted in the diminishment or destruction of not only Aramaic as a spoken tongue, but also many dialects of Berber


Aramaic and Berber are both still spoken today. 


Michael Zwingli said:


> has altered Kurdish and Farsi to the extent that they are barely recognizable as Indo-European languages


Not at all.  The influence of Arabic on these languages, and on Turkish, is almost exclusively lexical.  They are all easily recognizable as pertaining to their respective language families. 


Michael Zwingli said:


> of all the Semitic languages which might have existed today, there are but two, the rest having been subsumed.


There are more than two (Amharic, Maltese, and others are spoken today alongside Arabic and Hebrew).


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## WadiH

Michael Zwingli said:


> Even so, the spread of Arabic as a spoken daily language, however that occurred, has resulted in the diminishment or destruction of not only Aramaic as a spoken tongue, but also many dialects of Berber, and has altered Kurdish and Farsi to the extent that they are barely recognizanle as Indo-European languages, would you not say?



No, what are you even talking about.  Something tells me you barely recognize them as Indo-European languages because they're written in spooky Arabic letters. 



Michael Zwingli said:


> Because it rather faithfully reflects Proto-Semitic, especially phonetically, Arabic seems to me a very important language to  humankind. This even moreso because of a basic fact, that of all the Semitic languages which might have existed today, there are but two, the rest having been subsumed. I wish that we human beings would learn to value cultural diversity more, to view one another's cultures as an essential part of our own human cultural heritage. Anyways, I do...



It doesn't seem like you know much about the history of Aramaic with all due respect.  Most Semitic languages in the region were extinct by the time Islam appeared, and the language that (by your logic) 'encroached on' and 'subsumed' them was Aramaic.  Aramaic replaced Canaanite/Phoenician, Ugaritic, Hebrew, (non-Semitic) Philistian and of course Akkadian, etc.  And before that Akkadian replaced Sumerian, and Sumerian probably replaced something else.  None of these languages was intentionally trying to erase the other languages.  Anyway, as Elroy said, Aramaic survives to this day in many dialects across the region, and Persian became a world literary language in the post-Islamic period (and guess what, many local languages like Sogdian and Khawarizmian went extinct as a result).



elroy said:


> There are more than two (Amharic, Maltese, and others are spoken today alongside Arabic and Hebrew).



Maltese is Arabic, but there are numerous Semitic tongues spoken in Ethopia and Eritrea in addition to Amharic (e.g. Tigray and Tigrinya), and there are languages such as Mahri and its Modern South Arabian relatives in the southern Arabian Peninsula and the island of Socotra.


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## Drink

The influence of Arabic on Aramaic actually extends beyond lexical. For example, there is good reason to believe that before the spread of Arabic in the region, Aramaic emphatic consonants were pronounced glottally (like in Amharic) rather than pharyngeally (like in Arabic). This had far reaching effects on the phonology of the language beyond this trivial sounding detail. Furthermore, Arabic likely helped preserve the guttural consonants that were dying out in native Aramaic. Though they were still lost in many dialects.


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## Michael Zwingli

elroy said:


> Aramaic and Berber are both still spoken today.





Wadi Hanifa said:


> as Elroy said, Aramaic survives to this day in many dialects across the region,


I realize that Aramaic is yet spoken, but am of the thought that it is considered "highly endangered"... spoken in but a few linguistic pockets' in Syria, and Berber is a secondary language now in the places, the nations, where it is spoken.


Wadi Hanifa said:


> Aramaic replaced Canaanite/Phoenician, Ugaritic, Hebrew, (non-Semitic) Philistian and of course Akkadian, etc. And before that Akkadian replaced Sumerian, and Sumerian probably replaced something else. None of these languages was intentionally trying to erase the other languages.


Ah, yes, you are right. Perhaps my bemoaning the loss of so many languages is silly, but my love of diversity tends to prompt me in that direction. Language seems to me to be a type of living store of human cultural history, so that the loosely of one represents a diminishment in our ability to know and understand our own broad human history.

I have one question. If Philistian was not a Semitic language, what was it? To read so is a bit surprising to me.


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## WadiH

Michael Zwingli said:


> I realize that Aramaic is yet spoken, but am of the thought that it is considered "highly endangered"... spoken in but a few linguistic pockets' in Syria, and Berber is a secondary language now in the places, the nations, where it is spoken.



You are thinking of the Western dialects spoken near Damascus -- their speakers are indeed few but there is considerable government support for preserving those languages.  Most Aramaic speakers however live in and around northern Mesopotamia (between Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran).  These eastern dialects are spoken by anywhere from 500,000 to 1,000,000 people.  Not a huge number but not yet endangered.



Michael Zwingli said:


> Ah, yes, you are right. Perhaps my bemoaning the loss of so many languages is silly, but my love of diversity tends to prompt me in that direction. Language seems to me to be a type of living store of human cultural history, so that the loosely of one represents a diminishment in our ability to know and understand our own broad human history.



Many people feel that way about losing languages and dialects, including myself.  I think the issue we had was that your post seemed to imply that Arabic as a language was somehow morally suspect or that there was something illegitimate about its spread.  I was just pointing out that these linguistic changes have been happening for thousands of years -- in some cases it happens forcibly but in most cases it is just a function of migrations, political or cultural shifts and the passage of time, and that Aramaic in particular replaced more languages than most.



Michael Zwingli said:


> I have one question. If Philistian was not a Semitic language, what was it? To read so is a bit surprising to me.



Others here may be able to tell you more about this topic, but to my knowledge there are no surviving Philistine texts.  All we have from their language are isolated words and names borrowed by Hebrew, and those do not suggest a Semitic language.  It's also believed that they arrived in the area as one of the western 'Sea Peoples' during the Bronze Age Collapse, which makes it unlikely that they spoke a Semitic language.  Most scholars think they came from the Aegean region.


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## Drink

Though it is theorized that the Phillistines did adopt a Semitic Canaanite language eventually over the centuries after their arrival.


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## fdb

If I may return to the actual question: The Aramaic word for “lord” is māryā in the determined state and mār in the construct state. In Eastern Aramaic the title “my lord” is written m-r-y, but it is pronounced /mār/, because unstressed final vowels become silent in Eastern Aramaic. The spelling reflects older Aramaic mār-ī.


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## Michael Zwingli

Wadi Hanifa said:


> Most scholars think (the Philistians/Philistines) came from the Aegean region (during or after the Bronze Age Collapse).


Very interesting! This might make them somehow related to the Minoans (?), perhaps even the Minoans themselves (??).


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## Drink

fdb said:


> If I may return to the actual question: The Aramaic word for “lord” is māryā in the determined state and mār in the construct state. In Eastern Aramaic the title “my lord” is written m-r-y, but it is pronounced /mār/, because unstressed final vowels become silent in Eastern Aramaic. The spelling reflects older Aramaic mār-ī.


It seems the pronunciation mār in the construct state is found already in Old Aramaic, and so by far predates the Eastern Aramaic loss of final vowels that you speak of.


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## fdb

Drink said:


> It seems the pronunciation mār in the construct state is found already in Old Aramaic, and so by far predates the Eastern Aramaic loss of final vowels that you speak of.


These are two different issues. mār "lord of" (construct state) is older than mār "my lord".


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## Drink

fdb said:


> These are two different issues. mār "lord of" (construct state) is older than mār "my lord".


Oh sorry, I misread your comment.


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## WadiH

Michael Zwingli said:


> Very interesting! This might make them somehow related to the Minoans (?), perhaps even the Minoans themselves (??).



I suppose it's possible but I don't think there is enough detail to say one or the other.  The Wiki page on 'Philistines' lists the various theories.


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