To the ancient Greeks, people speaking other languages often sounded like they were saying “bar bar bar”. The bar-bar speakers became known as “barbarians“.
How people hear and interpret other languages that they don’t speak is quite fascinating. Unfortunately, it’s often used derogatively (like the “barbarians” above). For example, I’ve heard the rather racist remark that “asian” people talk like this: “ching chong ching chong”.
I’m rather intrigued by this. What sounds are being chosen to “represent” the languages? Do English speakers pick the same sounds as being salient?
To start with, here’s a rather loving “barbarism” of a Bollywood style music video into English – my loony bun is fine Benny Lava:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N2viKl3tdU]
Interestingly, there’s another rendition of this same video out there, which has a number of different barbarisms. In the first, we have “have you been high today”, whilst the second has “I’ll cook a haiku bread”.
So, what does English sound like to non-native speakers? Here’s how it sounds like to a German, and there’s a lot more English barbarisms on youtube.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAA_qbiOQ5k]
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Simon, you are grossly mistaken, the word Barbarian comes from ancient language of Sanskrit, in Sanskrit Babara mean one with long hair and hence those uncultured cruel horsemen from central asia were first called barbara in India, Infact the English name Barbara also originaly meant: Lady with long hair! Even today if you talk to any Indian who know Hindi, he will tell you what Barbara means.
Hi Prashant,
You may well be right – I’m certainly not an Indo-Europeanist! However, the wikipedia page I linked to above suggests that the Sanskrit form is related to the Greek. I suspect that the story is one of those little bits of linguistic mythology that hang around.
–Simon