Barbarians

The Ancient Greek word βάρβαρος barbaros, "barbarian", was an antonym for πολίτης politis, "citizen", from polis "city-state". The sound of barbaros onomatopoetically evokes the image of babbling (a person speaking a non-Greek language). The earliest attested form of the word is the Mycenaean Greek pa-pa-ro, written in Linear B syllabic script.
The Greeks used the term as they encountered scores of different foreign cultures, including the Egyptians, Persians, Medes, Celts, Germanic peoples, Phoenicians, Etruscans and Carthaginians. In fact, it became a common term to refer to all foreigners. However in various occasions, the term was also used by Greeks, especially the Athenians, to deride other Greek tribes and states (such as Epirotes, Eleans, Macedonians and Aeolic-speakers) in a pejorative and politically motivated manner. Of course, the term also carried a cultural dimension to its dual meaning. The verb βαρβαρίζειν (barbarízein) in ancient Greek meant imitating the linguistic sounds non-Greeks made or making grammatical errors in Greek.
Plato (Statesman 262de) rejected the Greek–barbarian dichotomy as a logical absurdity on just such grounds: dividing the world into Greeks and non-Greeks told one nothing about the second group. In Homer's works, the term appeared only once (Iliad 2.867), in the form βαρβαρόφωνος (barbarophonos) ("of incomprehensible speech"), used of the Carians fighting for Troy during the Trojan War. In general, the concept of barbaros did not figure largely in archaic literature before the 5th century BC. Still it has been suggested that "barbarophonoi" in the Iliad signifies not those who spoke a non-Greek language but simply those who spoke Greek badly.
Another possibility of "barbarian's" etymology may come from barba, which means beard. It is thought that perhaps barbarians were noted by the Greeks as having excessive hair and not maintaining a barbered appearance, and hence, were labeled accordingly.
A change occurred in the connotations of the word after the Greco-Persian Wars in the first half of the 5th century BC. Here a hasty coalition of Greeks defeated the vast Achaemenid Empire. Indeed in the Greek of this period 'barbarian' is often used expressly to mean Persian.
Greek barbaros was the etymological source for many cognate words meaning "barbarian", including English barbarian, which was first recorded in 16th-century Middle English.
The term Tartar or Tatar, which is derived from the name of the Tatar people, means a savage, intractable person, or ill-tempered person. The Tatars were any of the various Mongolian/Turkish tribes who overran Asia and much of eastern Europe in the Middle Ages under the leadership of Genghis Khan.
The root 'barbar' (varvar) is also found in the Sanskrit of ancient India.[14][15][16][17] The Greek word barbarikos formed on barbaros is related to Sanskrit barbaras (stammering).

Semantics * 1. etymologically, A foreigner, one whose language and customs differ from the speaker's. * 2. Hist. a. One not a Greek. b. One living outside the pale of the Roman empire and its civilization, applied especially to the northern nations that overthrew them. c. One outside the pale of Christian civilization. d. With the Italians of the Renascence: One of a nation outside of Italy. * 3. A rude, wild, uncivilized person. b. Sometimes distinguished from savage (perh. with a glance at 2). c. Applied by the Chinese contemptuously to foreigners. * 4. An uncultured person, or one who has no sympathy with literary culture. * †5. A native of Barbary. [See Barbary.] Obs. †b. A Barbary horse. Obs.[19]
The OED barbarous entry summarizes the semantic history. "The sense-development in ancient times was (with the Greeks) ‘foreign, non-Hellenic,’ later ‘outlandish, rude, brutal’; (with the Romans) ‘not Latin nor Greek,’ then ‘pertaining to those outside the Roman empire’; hence ‘uncivilized, uncultured,’ and later ‘non-Christian,’ whence ‘Saracen, heathen’; and generally ‘savage, rude, savagely cruel, inhuman.’"
Going against scholarly tradition, the historian Christopher I. Beckwith hypothesizes that "barbarian" only properly refers to Greco-Roman contexts and should not be used for Central Eurasian peoples.[20] He summarizes, "the word barbarian embodies a complex European cultural construct, a generic pejorative term for a 'powerful foreigner with uncouth, uncivilized, nonurban culture who was militarily skilled and somewhat heroic, but inclines to violence and cruelty' – yet not a 'savage' or a 'wild man'."[21] Beckwith also criticizes the Chinese language, which has several exonyms commonly translated as "barbarian" (see below). "There is also no single native word for "foreigner", no matter how pejorative, which includes the complex of the notions 'inability to speak Chinese', 'militarily skilled', 'fierce/cruel to enemies', and 'non-Chinese in culture'."[22] However, the above OED entry controverts both Beckwith's complex barbarian definition and his claim that Chinese lacks "barbarian" words. Definition 3c, "Applied by the Chinese contemptuously to foreigners", cites the Treaty of Tientsin prohibiting the Chinese from calling the British "Yi" 夷 "barbarians."[23] Linguistics differentiates between objective description of language usages and subjective prescription of which usages are considered proper or politically correct. Modern dictionaries like the OED descriptively record how English is used; individuals like Beckwith prescriptively opine how it should be used.