In article ,
Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
The ideogram meant "barbarian".

Well... if it was a single character, it just meant "foreigner."
"Barbarian" takes two.
Not that there's much of a distinction in Chinese.

Or most other places, if you go back not very far. "Barbarian" is from a
Greek word (via Latin) which meant either "foreign" or "ignorant", and
covered anyone who didn't speak Greek. (It's thought to have originated
as a mocking reference to foreign languages all sounding like "bar-bar"
to Greeks.)
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