Babur

Etymology

                              He was born as Ẓahīr-ud-Dīn Muḥammad (Persian: ظهیرالدین محمد‎), but was more commonly known by his nickname, Bābur (بابر). He had the royal titles Padshah and al-ṣultānu 'l-ʿazam wa 'l-ḫāqān al-mukkarram pādshāh-e ġāzī.^[4] Ẓahīr-ud-Dīn Muḥammad ("Defender of the faith") was an Arabic name and difficult to pronounce for the Central Asian Turko-Mongols, therefore the name Babur was adopted.^[5] According to Babur's cousin, Mirzā Muḥammad Haydar:

[...] at that time the Chaghatái (successors of Chagatai Khan who was son of Genghis Khan) were very rude and uncultured (bázári), and not refined (buzurg) as they are now; thus they found Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad difficult to pronounce, and for this reason gave him the name of Bábar. In the public prayers (khutba) and in royal mandates he is always styled 'Zahir-ud-Din Bábar Muhammad,' but he is best known as Bábar Pádisháh.^[6]

According to Stephen Frederic Dale, the name Babur is derived from the Persian word babr, meaning "tiger", a word that repeatedly appears in Firdawsī's Shāhnāma^[7] and had also been borrowed by the Turkic languages of Central Asia.^[8][9] This thesis is supported by the explanation that the Turko-Mongol name Timur underwent a similar evolution, from the Sanskrit word cimara ("iron") via a modified version *čimr to the final Turkicized version timür, with -ür replacing -r due to need to provide vocalic support between m and r. The choice of vowel would nominally be restricted to one of the four front vowels (e,i, ö, ü per the Ottoman vowel harmony rule), hence babr → babür, although the rule is routinely violated for words of Persian or Arabic derivation.^[10]

Contradicting these views, W.M. Thackston argues that the name cannot be taken from babr and instead must be derived from a word that has evolved out of the Indo-European word for beaver, pointing to the fact that the name is pronounced bāh-bor^[11] in both Persian and Turkic, similar to the Russian word for beaver (бобр – bobr).