4 min
I Now Pronounce You In or Out
Sociolinguistics is a scientific approach to the complex relationships between language and social life. One key area of research for sociolinguists involves the way language communities use the subtleties of language to distinguish “real insiders” from both “imposters” and “outsiders”. This Word Stories instalment shines an etymological spotlight on words that exemplify the way people use language to define themselves and label others.
barbarian
The ancient Greek adjective barbaros first meant “foreign”, i.e. “not speaking or not fluent in the Greek language”. It was used to describe various peoples living outside of the Greek realm, such as Persians, Medes, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and later Turks. At times, the label would be applied to speakers of a different variety of Greek. For example, Athenians could describe Aeolians, Boeotians and Thessalians as “barbarians”, emphasizing the dialectal differences found within the Aeolic Greek these peoples spoke. It is easy to see how the term quickly became disparaging: that which is “foreign” was equated to that which is “uncivilized, ill-bred, brutish” or indeed “barbaric”. This semantic shift seems to have become definitive in ancient Greek by the start of the fifth century BCE, during the outbreak of the Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 BCE).
Homer’s Iliad, composed around the eighth century BCE, uses the early form or variant barbarophonos, meaning “speaking a foreign speech” and therefore “incomprehensible”. In English translations of the Iliad, the term is rendered by “uncouth of speech” (A. T. Murray), “of uncouth language” (Rodney Merrill), “with barbarous tongues” (Alexander Pope), “men of strange speech” (Samuel Butler), “distinguished by their jarring sounds” (James Macpherson), etc. An even earlier attestation is found in Mycenaean Greek, the most ancient form of the Greek language, used between the 16th and 12th centuries BCE. It was noted approximately as “ǂǂ†” in the Linear B syllabic script used for writing Mycenaean Greek, and was approximately pronounced pa-pa-ro. Ancient Greek also had a verb, barbarizein, which meant “to behave or speak like a barbarian”, “to speak Greek poorly”, and perhaps also “to stammer”. Further inquiries into the etymological roots of the term almost certainly yield an onomatopoeic origin: the series bar-bar-bar-bar as a stereotypical example of “an utterance spoken by non-Greeks”.
In English, most forms using the radical barbar- appear during the Late Middle and Early Modern English periods, usually via Latin, and sometimes under the influence of a corresponding Old or Middle French etymon. In order of appearance, we find: barbar, meaning “barbarian” or “barbarous” (late 1300s, obsolete in Modern English), barbaric (1388, in Wycliffe’s Bible), barbarous (1526), barbarously (1531), barbarousness (1549, in a translation of Erasmus), barbarian (around 1550, as both noun and adjective), barbarity (1570), barbarism (1578) and barbarize (1644, in Milton). Barbarically and barbarization are 19th-century coinages.
In the context of contemporary ethics, the etymologies of barbarian, barbaric, barbarous and the like are often quoted as historical examples of linguistic discrimination or “linguicism”, i.e. the prejudicial treatment of an individual or group on the basis of their use of a certain language, as well as of “linguocentrism” or “linguacentrism”, i.e. the belief in the superiority of one language over another, or over all others.
Atticism
In the classical world, the art of rhetoric was dominated by paid professionals and public figures, many of whom carried purple prose to dizzying heights. By the first century BCE, educated Greek had become mannered and ornate to the point that many cultured people rejected it as overblown. These early neoclassical types began composing their writings and speeches in the “conservative” kind of Greek associated with ancient Attica and its capital city, Athens. In this context, Atticism (Greek attikismos) evoked the ideal of a clean and elegant old Greek style, and to Atticize (Greek attikizein) meant to imitate such a style. When English borrowed these words in the 17th century, they remained connected to such ancient questions of tasteful Greek style, but over time an Atticism also came to mean a graceful and concise turn of phrase in English itself.
solecism
In the Hellenistic period, Soli was a busy port city, located in modern-day Turkey. Soli had a decent Greek pedigree as an old colony and a part of Alexander the Great’s empire, but the dialect of Greek spoken by the locals didn’t command much respect. People in the refined and powerful cultural centre of Athens looked down upon Soli’s Greek the way a proud British speaker of the King’s English might look down on quirks of English emerging in Alabama or Australia. For Athenians, a solecism (Greek soloikismos) referred literally to the kind of corrupted Greek one might hear in Soli (Greek Soloi), and the label served by extension as a term of derision for uneducated or broken Greek in general.
When Rome’s empire inherited this world stage, elite Romans with good Greek tutors adopted the word as solœcismus to condemn bad Latin, inspiring classically educated anglophones of the 16th century to refer to linguistic barbarisms committed in English as solœcismes. By the end of the century, the word was also being used in English to describe any barbarous faux pas, including failures of social etiquette, and both senses of solecism (the verbal and the social) survive today.
laconic
The ancient inhabitants of the Greek region called Laconia had a reputation for short, gruff talk—especially in their capital city of Sparta. According to one Roman-era account, when the Macedonian conqueror Philip II had fought his way to the vicinity of Sparta, he sent word to the Spartans asking if they’d rather see him arrive as friend or foe, and they simply answered, “Neither.” When Philip wrote again to threaten serious consequences “if I invade”, the Spartans stubbornly sent another one-word reply: “If.”
Given such stories about the people of Laconia, it’s not surprising that the Greek adjective Lakōnikos and its Latin derivative Lacōnicus (both literally meaning “from Laconia”) were used to describe concise, pithy ways of speaking. Many centuries later, classically educated English speakers drew on this tradition by using the loanword laconic to mean both “from Laconia” (P. Holland, Pliny’s Historie of the World, 1601) and “terse” (King James I, Original Letters, 1589). The passage of a few more centuries has effectively erased the former meaning in common usage, though. In most people’s minds, laconic communication involves a few short words, and that’s the end of the story. The adjective’s original association with Laconia and legend is reduced to an etymological footnote, if it’s remembered at all. If.
