disc▪ Accord. to Huehnergard2011, the vb. goes back to Sem *ŠḪR ‘to be(come) fearful, intimidated, stock-still’ (cf. Akk šuḫarruru ‘to become dazed, still, numb with fear; to abate, subside’).
▪ If Huehnergard is right, then the primary meaning of Ar saḫ˅ra is the one conserved in ↗saḫḫara ‘to subject, make subservient’ (< *‘to intimidate’, caus. of vb. I, *‘to be fearful, numb with fear’), and probably also in ↗†saḫara ‘to have good wind (ship)’ (< *‘to make the wind subservient’, or *‘to obey to the wind’). ‘To jeer, scoff, ridicule’ would then be secondary, derived from ‘to make subservient’ (< *‘to look down at s.o., despise s.o., because he has been subjugated’, perhaps in the special sense of ‘forced into corvée, or compulsory labour’) or from *‘to intimidate’ (‘to jeer, scoff, ridicule’ < *‘to intimidate, make numb’ through mockery). In this case, however, the intransitivity of saḫira becomes problematic (the vb. is constructed with min or bi‑). Could it be denominative from one the many vn.s that may have come into Ar from another language, e.g. Syr? The Pael forms and vn.s in Syr that are cognate to ↗saḫḫara would support this assumption.
▪ Gabal2012 regards Ar √SḪR as an extension of a biconsonantal basis *SḪ- ‘to be soft, smooth’. He explains saḫara ‘to have a good wind’ as *‘to let o.s. be drawn smoothly, without resistance’, something that implies a certain ‘lightness, ease’ (ḫiffaẗ), which is also to be found in saḫara ‘to jeer, scoff, mock’, the latter actually meaning *‘to value lightly, disdain, look down upon, (hence also) not to take seriously’.
▪ For a discussion of the “root” as whole, see ↗SḪR.