Someone tried to tell me that the Barbarians got their name from the Romans. Apparently their language was so gutteral sounding to the Latins that when they spoke it sounded as if they were saying, “bar, bar, bar, bar”.
Needless to say, as cute as the story is, I need some confirmation to repeat this little fact at dinner parties.
I tried searching the message boards, but lots of Dopers like to use the word ‘barbarian’ in their posts. An internet search seemed just as fruitless as I got countless sites with Conan as the main focus. Can anyone help me?
The Oxford English Dictionary, my usual first search for etymology, only gives the history of the word back to the Middle Ages. I do know that it is not derivative of another Greek term (as “economy” is derivative of “oikos” [house] or utopia is derivative of “ou topos” [no place]), which would lend credence to it being onomatopoeic, and the “b” sound was not pleasant to the Greeks rather like the hard “ch” in Hebrew isn’t pleasant to westerners. I’ve always read the “bar bar” story also and think it’s probably the correct one.
Barbarian www.westegg.com/etymology
From the Greek “barbaroi,” meaning “babblers,” used to mean non-Greeks, i.e., people who didn’t speak Greek; from the sound that the Greeks thought they were making: “bar bar bar bar…”
The Berber peoples of North Africa got that name the same way, from the Romans. They call themselves by the name of their individual tribes, for example the Imazighen of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. But they don’t mind being called “Berber” by non-Berbers.
I’d heard that it comes from their habit of wearing beards. The Latin for “beard” is “barba.” Romans didn’t wear 'em, so they saw Those People as, well, barbaric.
I’m not sure if this is true or not, not knowing enough about Roman culture and Latin etymology, but there ya go.
The word “boob” traces from the Spanish bobo meaning stupid, which in turn comes from the Latin balbus meaning stammering. The ancient Romans considered stammering to be a sign of stupidity. This type of word is called “echoic,” kind of onomatopeic, reflecting the repetitive stammer
My Latin prof at University told our class the same story that you heard. He said that speakers of Latin didn’t like gutteral sounds and glottal stops. These noises grated on their ears and foreign tongues did sound like “bar bar bar” to them. Thus, the origin of the word. Someone also brought up the beard theory to him, and he dismissed that.
Yeah, I dunno about the beard theory. It went in and out of fashion in Rome-- after Marcus Aurelius grew one (for example) it seems that everybody did for a while after.