Barbarian

Barbarian has scarcely outgrown its origins as a disparaging term for foreigner, one not sharing a recognized culture or degree of polish with the speaker or writer employing the term. The word derives from the Greek, and expresses with mocking duplication ("bar-bar") alleged attempts by outsiders to speak a "real" language. A "barbarism" in language, especially Greek or Latin, is a term for a misformed word, such as a solecism or a malapropism. Related terms are barbaric and barbarous.

Barbarian is used in its Hellenic sense by Paul in the New Testament (Romans 1:14 KJV) to describe non-Greeks, and to describe one who merely speaks a different language (1 Corinthians 14:11 KJV). The word is not used in these scriptures in the modern sense of "savage".

Historically, the term has seen widespread use. It is a deep-seated human instinct to dismiss alien culture, and to treat even rival civilizations as "barbarian" because they are unrecognizably strange. The Greeks admired Scythian and Eastern Gauls as heroic individuals, but considered their culture "barbarian." The Romans indiscriminately regarded the nomadic Germanic peoples, thesettled and civilized Gauls, and the genuinely barbaric Huns as barbarians all, while the Han Chinese of the Chinese Empire have used the term to refer to the Xiongnu, Tartars, Turks, Mongols, Jurchen, Manchu, and Europeans.

Converted barbarians have historically proved sometimes the staunchest supporters of the more developed culture they have recently subverted. Historic examples are the Lombards and the Manchu. "The best Romans", wrote Henry James, "are often northern barbarians."

Often today, barbarian is used to mean someone violent, primitive, uncouth or uncivilized in general. See also Philistine.

A non-pejorative, simply functional concept of "barbarian," as sociologists have redefined the term, depends upon a carefully-defined use of "civilization," denoting a settled, urban way of life that is organized on principles broader than the extended family or tribe, in which surpluses of necessities can be stored and redistributed and division of labor produces some luxury goods (even if only for gods and kings). The barbarian is technically a social parasite on civilization, who depends on settlements as a source of slaves, surpluses and portable luxuries: booty, loot and plunder.

Rich, deep authentic human culture exists even without civilization, as the German writers of the early Romantic generation first defined the opposing terms, though they used them as polarities in a way that a modern writer might not. "Culture" should not simply connote "civilization."

The culture of the nomad is not to be confused with the barbarian, either. The nomad subsists on the products of his flocks, and follows their needs. The nomad may barter for necessities, like metalwork, but does not depend on civilization for plunder, as the barbarian does.