prisoner, captive, prisoner of war – WehrCowan1979.
▪ A pseudo-PP from ʔasara ‘to tie, bind, imprison’, see ↗s.v..
▪ eC7 Q 8:70 qul li-man fī ʔaydī-kum mina ’l-ʔasrà ‘Say unto those captives who are in your hands’
The word has itself a number of cognates in other Sem languages, e.g. Hbr ʔāsîr, Syr ʔasīrā ‘bondman, prisoner’. – For the wider context cf. ↗ʔasara.
▪ ↗ʔasara. ▪ According to Kogan 2011, »Akk asīru ‘prisoner’, well documented already in oBab, is not to be treated as an internally Akk derivation from esēru ‘to enclose’, but rather as a loanword from an early WSem term continued by Hbr ʔāsīr‑ and Ar ʔasīr.«. ▪ Eg jṯr ‘captive’ is a Sem loan-word – ThesaurusLinguaeAegypticae.
▪ Lokotsch1927#118, Turek 2001: Ar ʔasīr gave Tu esir1
, dial. Tu yesir, whence the word spread into Slav langs, cf. Serb (dial.) jesir, Ukr jasyr ‘captive’, Pol jasyr (C17) ‘(being) captive of the Turks’, Russ (old and dial.) jasyr’, jesyr’ ‘slave’.