The term Sahib has been applied indiscriminately to any person, whether Indian or non-Indian. These included Europeans who came to the subcontinent as traders in the 16th century, and so the first mention of the word in European documents is in 1673. He and others who thought Miss Sahib had gone to church smoked the hookah of the clap in a nearby compound. “Akhab Khan prevented these Shia dogs from shooting you and Mayne-sahib,” the silent whisper continues. sahib (some accusative sahibi, plural sahiblər) Jim Davis uses the term in a 1983 Garfield comic book in which Garfield refers to Jon Arbuckle as “sahib” after Jon asked Garfield to take his diary,[6] and again in a 1989 strip after Jon asked Garfield to go out and see if it was still raining. The term Sahib (usually pronounced Saab) was used on P&O ships that had an Indian and/or Pakistani crew to refer to officers and especially high-ranking officers. On P&O Cruises and Princess Cruises ships, the term was used for many years by non-Indian/non-Pakistani junior officers to refer to senior deck and machine officers, even though there was no Indian or Pakistani crew in the shipping company. The animals and humans seemed to be drowsy, but they woke up active as they approached the Sahib. During the British Raj, Indians used Sahib to respectfully address the British people, and British officers used the word when speaking to Indian officers.
This tradition continues today in the Indian Army. Sahib is also used to show respect to men who are considered a higher or lower caste than the speaker. Sahib comes from Urdu, where it means “master”, and is derived from an Arabic root that means “friend or companion”. In some parts of the Indian subcontinent, the word sahib is used as a polite way of addressing a man. Today, it has become more common to say “sir” instead, but many people still use sahib. The term is used exclusively to refer to any white European from the Indian subcontinent, while Rudyard Kipling`s 1901 novel Kim is ethnically a “Sahib” but was raised as a boy native to the lower castes. Most of the sahibs in the novel are British, but there is also a Russian and a Frenchman. Pukka sahib was also a term used to refer to a real and legitimate authority, where Pukka means “absolutely real”. The term is often used in Robert E. Howard`s short stories, mainly by Indian or Arab characters – for example, a Sikh servant addresses his employer`s guests in The Noseless Horror as “Sahib”.
Five hundred returned and swore that they would stand at “Lar-rence-sahib Bahadur” until the end. These sample sentences are automatically selected from various online information sources to reflect the current use of the word “sahib”. The opinions expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us your feedback. By way of borrowing, Sahib has been translated into several languages, including Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik, Crimean Tatar [2], Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Pashto, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Rohingya and Somali. In the Middle Ages, it was used as a greeting, either as an official title or as an honorary title. Now, in South and Central Asia, it is used almost exclusively to pay homage to someone who is more or less high. For example, drivers in South Asia are often referred to as Sahib and so on. The honorary title was largely replaced by Monsieur.
Some shorten sahib to saab. This louse boy had a debt for the humiliation he had offered to the Sahib of the village, and now he was paid in full. Sahiba is the authentic form of greeting used for a woman. However, under the British Raj, the word used for women members of the establishment was adapted to memsahib, a variant of the English word “ma`am” was added to the word sahib. In the British Indian Army, a British officer referred to the officer of a viceroy (i.e., an indigenous Indian officer) as “sahib” or “sahib”. In turn, Indian soldiers addressed British or Indian superiors with this term as a substitute for “sir.” This greeting is preserved in the current army of independent India to this day. *imək (“to be”) is a defective verb, its missing forms are provided by the current simple copules (which appear as suffixes) and by olmaq. The real infinitive form would be sahib olmaq, since the verb olmaq serves as the infinitive form of *imek and itself.
sä`ib, n. a concept of respect that is shown in India to people of rank and Europeans. (Hind. sāhib – Ar. sāhib.) The term is used throughout the children`s book A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. From Hindustani (Hindi, Urdu) साहिब (sāhib) / صاحب (sāhib, “Lord”), from Persian صاحب (sâheb), from Arabic صَاحِب (ṣāḥib, “companion”). Sahib or Saheb (/ˈsɑːhɪb/; Arabic: صاحب) is an Arabic title meaning “companion”. It was historically used for the first caliph Abu Bakr in the Qur`an. [1] The title is still applied to the caliph by Sunni Muslims. [1] It should be noted that the character mentioned was never in India and had no connection with India. In Bruce Marshall`s The World, the Flesh and Father Smith, the protagonist serves as a military chaplain in the trenches of the First World War, giving absolution to soldiers and officers about to go into battle. A major told him, “God is sometimes a bit of a guy.