barbarian [ME] The ancient Greeks had a high opinion of themselves and a correspondingly low one of other peoples. They called everyone who did not speak Greek barbaros or ‘foreign’, which is where we get barbarian and related words barbaric [LME], barbarity [L17th], and barbarous [E16th]. The word barbaros originally imitated the unintelligible language of foreigners, which to the Greeks just sounded like ba, ba, ba.