BARBARIAN — and the word is onomatopoeia. To a Greek ear a foreign language sounded like 'bar-bar-bar', so a barbaros is simply somebody whose speech you cannot parse; it began as a description of noise and hardened into a description of people. Paul says he is a debtor 'to Greeks and to barbarians, to the wise and to the senseless' (Romans 1:14) — two divisions of the whole human race, by culture and by capacity, with himself in debt to all four groups. → first discussed at Rom 1:14