The word “Berber/Barbar” may not be from Greek but from an Ancient Egyptian ethnonym for the Puntites.

[Emir of Zayla]

It has often been assumed that the appellation of the word Barbar/Berber designating proto-somalis originated with the ancient Greeks as a cognate of barbaros ("barbarian") because when spoken to, didn’t understand the language.

However, the first mention of the term actually dates earlier to the New Kingdom of Egypt (c. 1500 BCE), when it served as an ethnonym for the Puntites. Specifically, during the Hatshepsut expedition to Punt, the ancient Egyptians identified their Puntite counterparts as brbrta in hieroglyphic symbols. This is believed to have been an onomatopoeic imitation on the Egyptians' part of the "bar" or "ber" sound that was apparently common in the native language.

 

[Shimbiris]

Yes, @Idilinaa first clued me into this many months ago and I discussed it with @The alchemist. It seems to me that it has been mistranslated by western authors to be the word "Barbaroi" or "Barbarus" among Greeks and Latin speakers when in reality we are probably looking at a term similar to "Arab" on the other side of the Red Sea:

I'm getting the sense that "Barbari/Barbara/Barbar" might be a sort of parallel to "Arab" on the other side of the Red Sea. "Arab" itself as a name predates the Arabic language with only maybe Proto-Arabic being spoken when the first ever Arabs were mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gindibu

Eventually the word "Arab" got extrapolated onto the entire Arabian peninsula including southern Iraq, what is now Jordan and parts of Palestine. Most likely because groups like the Greeks and Romans noticed these groups had a similar overall culture in terms of attire, customs and their overall way of life. Not to mention similar phenotypes and languages that would have sounded probably like mere dialects of one language to an outsider. I've heard reconstructions of Sabaean, Himyaritic and various other Semitic languages of the pre-Islamic peninsula including surviving ones like the MSA languages of Yemen and Oman and an outsider could easily think they were just listening to variations of Arabic, for example, or even variations of Syriac.

I suspect something similar occurred on our side of the Red Sea. "Barbari" or some variation of it was likely a name for one particular group or region then the Greeks and Romans similarly extrapolated it onto a wide range of people from Upper Egypt down to Northern Somalia because, as I suspect, just like in the 19th century you would observe these people and feel as though you were looking at mere regional variations of the same overall culture:


Egypt, Sudan & Chad:

Abyssinia and Eritrean coast:

Somalia:

Walaal, if you showed me all of these images and claimed I was looking at one country called "Aethiopia" or "Barbaria" and that the people in them were merely countrymen separated by simple regional variations I would not bat an eye. It's incredible how similar our ancestors were material culture wise and in terms of a plethora of customs like the custom of cutting children's hair in strange patterns found from the Nile Valley to Abyssinia to Somaliweyn, to the coffee culture, to even unfortunate things such as FGM.

We are truly a bloc much like Arabians. Only in our case the linguistic and genetic divisions are more extreme but we are still mostly very interrelated in that sense as well.

Tl;dr: It seems to have originally been an ethnic or tribal term used for one particular group of Northeast Africans around Nubia that then got extrapolated onto the rest of us by the Greco-Romans who probably just noticed we were all very culturally and phenotypically similar just like how they blanketed "Arab" over the entire peninsula despite it being very linguistically diverse, within the Western Semitic group, before the Islamic conquests.

 

[The alchemist]

Yes, @Idilinaa first clued me into this many months ago and I discussed it with @The alchemist. It seems to me that it has been mistranslated by western authors to be the word "Barbaroi" or "Barbarus" among Greeks and Latin speakers when in reality we are probably looking at a term similar to "Arab" on the other side of the Red Sea:



Tl;dr: It seems to have originally been an ethnic or tribal term used for one particular group of Northeast Africans around Nubia that then got extrapolated onto the rest of us by the Greco-Romans who probably just noticed we were all very culturally and phenotypically similar just like how they blanketed "Arab" over the entire peninsula despite it being very linguistically diverse, within the Western Semitic group, before the Islamic conquests.

I forgot I found this the other day just sifting through a Rendille linguistic text. The content claimed 'berber' meant shoulder in the Rendille language:

They also show the "Benadir" dialect version, signifying a young man, consistent with what you told me back then.

It can be something salient, relatively archaic pre-proto-Somaloid.

 

[The alchemist]

@Emir of Zayla @Shimbiris

This is pretty robust at this point. We have many separate sources that correspond.

 

[The alchemist]

There was an ancient caravan post called Berber in Sudan, an existing city today historically inhabited by Beja and Arabs.