Looking up the etymology of barbarian - as you might know, the Greeks came up with the word to refer to someone who didn’t speak Greek and therefore wasn’t civilised, someone who just babbled ‘bar bar bar’. The earliest reference in Mycenae is apparently ‘pa pa ro’.
I’m imagining it as similar to some idiot who doesn’t like China today saying they all sound like ‘ching chong ching’ or similar. Does any language that the Greeks would have encountered have these sort of words that would sound like a Greek ear like ‘bar bar bar’? Later on the term came to refer to the Persian Empire - would Old Persian sound like this stammering to one who didn’t speak it?
Wikipedia says that it’s possible from references in the Iliad that it meant someone trying to speak Greek badly, although in my time that’s something I’ve been guilty of and there aren’t too many ‘bar-’ or repetitive sounds I remember.
One of the most common idioms English speaking people use to characterise the sound of themselves talking is “blah, blah, blah”, which is so close to “bar, bar, bar” it doesn’t matter.
It’s hard for me as a native English speaker to hear what we would sound like to someone who doesn’t speak English, but I’m guessing we sound like “blah, blah, blah”.
I think it’s true that people tend to hear and remember the sound of the unfamiliar parts of a foreign language - i.e. if it has lots of glottal stops, or hard vowels, or whatever - so if it’s really true that Greek doesn’t have many repeated ‘bar’ type sounds, those would stand out from the background of incomprehensible speech.
Apparently ‘blah’ derives from ‘blab’, itself derived from Old High German ‘blabbizōn’, could be related though. As for what English sounds to non speakers, it’s an excuse to link to this song.
That’s what I was thinking as it’s onomatopoeic, was wondering if those sounds could be narrowed down to any more specific languages the Greeks would have encountered.
Ba is also one of the earliest sounds a baby will make in early babbling, any baby anywhere, before they babble in sounds more related to the language[s] they hear. So it’s a baby sound.
There are some interesting videos on YouTube where ESL speakers have demonstrated what they think English sounds like in general (i.e. making what they consider to be English sounds, just not intelligible English words).
Obviously, it’s a perceptual thing though, so any given dialect of English might be perceived differently from, say, the viewpoint of a Xhosa language speaker vs Mandarin.
Maybe a little far-fetched, but the most important neighbors of the Greeks, and their most present enemies, were Aramaic speaker (Persian empire notably).
Probably one the most frequently used word in this language is … “bar” meaning “son”, as in Yeshua bar Dawid, “son of david”. Ancient semites being fond of speaking of their lineage, I could well imagine Biblical litanies of “son of X son of Y son of Z …” that would give the word “bar” a symbolic status.
There’s been occasional “how does English sound to people who speak other languages” threads here on the SDMB, and it does seem to vary from person to person depending on their native language. For example, I recall someone mentioning how to someone like them whose native language uses few sibilants it sounds like English speakers hiss a lot.
Great observation, this could actually be it (though it would be hard to prove). Several Semitic languages include a similar word for son. Cf. Osama Bin Laden, i.e. Osama Ladenson.
Other languages that the Greeks would probably have been in contact with would probably include Latin, Persian, Turkish, Slavic languages, Celtic languages (e.g. Galatian, Gaulish), and Germanic languages (e.g. Gothic, German). Perhaps the Minoan language (from whence Greek took the Linear B writing system) was an influence, though I think the actual Minoan language is lost and we don’t know what it sounded like.
I have heard a different version of this, which I think may shed some light.
When I took Latin, we were taught that the word “barbarian” (barbarus, meaning foreigner or stranger) came from the word “barbam”, which means beard. The Romans were clean shaven, and so people with beards were foreigners. (This does not explain the very similar word in Greek which meant non-Greeks).
However, they also told us that the Romans had given the name “Berber” to the people of North Africa because they didn’t speak anything the Romans recognized as a language: when the spoke it sounded like “berberberberberber”.
Now, the etymology dictionary at Dictionary.com seem to think “barbara” is Sanskrit for “stammering”, but I’m beginning to think this might be encyclopedic error: a credible source reports an old wives’ tale as fact, other sources take that as confirmation, and soon they all are reporting it and citing each other as sources.
That’s 1600-1100BC, long before the Greeks met the Persians.
Their closest neighbours at the time were all Indo-European rather than Semetic speakers; Lydians and other descendants/cousins of the Hittites in western Anatolia, Thracians and Illyrians to the north.
I suspect it’s not really based on how another language specifically sounded, but a sort of “blah blah blah”–if that’s the derivation,* really.* And it seems to be a term far older than Greek itself, considering its cognates in other IE languages mentioned in this thread.
The folk etymology I was told was that Greeks compared foreign languages to the sound of sheep bleating. “Bar bar bar” was their version of “Bah bah bah”.
