Ottoman Algeria in Western Diplomatic History with ... - Bibliothèque

meaning a person speaking beneath his teeth, or a sort of muttering or babbling,
because the original inhabitants spoke a language that was un-understandable
to them; so they called the inhabitants ‏,بربر pl. برابرة or Berber and, in the long,
the land came to be known as ‘barbary.’ The second origin of the word is
attributed to the Greco-Romans. The Romans used to call non-Romanized
inhabitants at the periphery of the Roman Empire barbarus, meaning
‘barbarous,’ whatever the region they lived in. Those were foreign people who
were outsiders to the circle of Roman civilization. Their languages, manners,
and customs and traditions were different from that of the Romans. Therefore,
for the Romans, the Latin word barbarus meant the same thing as ‘outsider’ or
‘foreigner’. 36 Laugier de Tassy however held a different view; according to
him, when the Roman armies of Julius Caesar and Augustus conquered this
vast part of North Africa, which used to be called Mauritania, they called it
‘barbary’ because the people who inhabited it opposed a fierce resistance to
Roman conquest never witnessed before. 37
The Latin word barbarus in itself is derived from the Greek barbaros,
“probably a word imitative of un-intelligible speech,” which means “foreign in
speech, barbarian, hence harsh-sounding.” 38 This word is close in meaning to
the Arab world Barbara, which led many to conclude that the Arabs
36 For the Different etymologies see E. Mercier, “Ethnographie de l’Afrique septentrionale : notes sur
l’origine du peuple berbère. Revue Africaine. 15: 85 (Jan., 1871), pp. 421-26; Jean Monlaü, Les états
barbaresques, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), pp. 7-12, Thomson, Barbary and
Enlightenment, pp. 13-15.
37 Tassy, Royaume d’Alger, p. 3. This view is based on the narrative St. Augustine, a native of North
Africa, who used the term barbarus as a substitute for North African natives who resisted Roman rule
and Christianity.
38 “Barbarous,” The Concise English Dictionary, p. 87.
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