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.

 

[Shimbiris]

Harking back to this, it's actually fairly common for people to do this throughout history. Anyone who speaks a Romance language like French or who speaks Arabic may have heard the names like "Allemagne" and "ألمانيا" for Germany. It comes from this dominant confederacy of tribes in Germanic lands:

Alemanni - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Alamannia - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

They were landheeres the Romans just happened to interact with a lot and their name sort of stuck as a blanket term for what is now Germany. Anyone who speaks Arabic or some other languages of the Middle-East (even Aramaic) may have also noticed the strange name "Younan" for Greeks. It comes from:

Ionians - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

One of the four major tribes and dialectal groups of ancient Greece

Don't think it's a coincidence that the Ionian dialect was the one most bordering "Asia". Probably were just the Greeks they dealt with the most often and the name stuck.

These "Barbars" of Nubia were probably just among the first groups the Greco-Romans interacted with along the "Coastal Cushitic" chain and possibly remarkable on a political and economic level in terms of activity and then they just noticed the strong similarity in garbs, customs, phenotypes and even languages (phonologically would've sounded eerily similar to an outsider) as they went down all the way to the Somali coast and just blanket termed everyone with that group's name similar to what the Latin speakers and Semitic speakers did above.

@The alchemist @Idilinaa @Emir of Zayla

 

[The alchemist]

Harking back to this, it's actually fairly common for people to do this throughout history. Anyone who speaks a Romance language like French or who speaks Arabic may have heard the names like "Allemagne" and "ألمانيا" for Germany. It comes from this dominant confederacy of tribes in Germanic lands:

Alemanni - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Alamannia - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

They were landheeres the Romans just happened to interact with a lot and their name sort of stuck as a blanket term for what is now Germany. Anyone who speaks Arabic or some other languages of the Middle-East (even Aramaic) may have also noticed the strange name "Younan" for Greeks. It comes from:

Ionians - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

One of the four major tribes and dialectal groups of ancient Greece

Don't think it's a coincidence that the Ionian dialect was the one most bordering "Asia". Probably were just the Greeks they dealt with the most often and the name stuck.

These "Barbars" of Nubia were probably just among the first groups the Greco-Romans interacted with along the "Coastal Cushitic" chain and possibly remarkable on a political and economic level in terms of activity and then they just noticed the strong similarity in garbs, customs, phenotypes and even languages (phonologically would've sounded eerily similar to an outsider) as they went down all the way to the Somali coast and just blanket termed everyone with that group's name similar to what the Latin speakers and Semitic speakers did above.

@The alchemist @Idilinaa @Emir of Zayla

Makes sense. I always wondered why I heard "Almaniya" for Germany growing up.

Reminds me of how loanwords from back in the day might capture older roots. We say "kaniisad" for a church. We got it from the Arabs (kaniisa). The Arabs got it from the Latin and/or Greek words, ecclesia/ekklesia. The word was originally used by the Ancient Greeks as a place of gathering by the public in a city-state:

Ecclesia (ancient Greece) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Riftvalley]

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.
View attachment 301309

The name seems to have extended into deep into Eastern Africa to describe Somali agro pastoralist traders who were trading Nilotic and Bantus. We had a discussions about the Barbaroi in a few other threads relating to the mythical Shunguwaya.

 

[NidarNidar]

I love these type of topics, I remember reading something similar from an older post.

edit found it.

Etymology of Barbar/Berber

Rendille word for human: Barbar. In modern Somali it means youngsters. It can also be used to mean the place where someone was raised; Apollo Wuxu ku barbaaray immigrant ghetto. (Apollo was raised in an immigrant ghetto). You will know there is a famous Somali city called Barbara. There is a...

www.somalispot.com

 

[Maakhri2024]

The word kanisa كنيسة itself is not originally from Arabic, but is derived from Aramaic and Syriac .

The Syriac word kanisha ܟܢܝܫܬܐ means "assembly", while the Greek word used in the New Testament is "ekklesia" which means assembly.
kanishta כנישתא / kaniishta ܟܢܝܫܬܐ → kanisa كنيسة

The root of the Arabic word (k-n-s كنس) means to sweep and hide.
From this linguistic root (k-n-s كنس) derives the word (miknasa مكنسة) which means broom.

The root of the Aramaic/Syriac word (ܟ ܢ ܫ k-n-š) means to sweep, gather, assemble, collect.

The Aramaic/Syriac triliteral root (ܟ ܢ ܫ k-n-sh) and the Arabic triliteral root (k-n-s كنس) are related to the Somali bilateral root ( q-r : qari ) which means to hide and the Egyptian triliteral root (q-r-s : qares ) meaning to bury.

q-r : qari → q-r-n : qarin / q-r-s : qaris → kanas / kaniš / kanish

قَرِ ← قَرِسْ ← كَنِشْ ← كَنِسْ
​

 

[TheLand]

I propose that this word actually means furthest land east on the continent or just ‘east-land’. The Somali word for east is ‘Bari’, which sounds very similar, but why is that significant? In Somali ‘Bari’ isn’t simply ‘East’, it comes from the word ‘Waa-Bari’ or ‘Waaq-Bari’, the place where the sun rises. It is basically the land of the rising sun (similar to Japan which is even further east). For the Egyptians this would have been significant because they worshipped the sun as the god Ra. They even referred to the land of punt as the ‘land of the gods’ which actually makes more sense if we consider it as the place where their sun god came out of or ‘rose’ every day. The repetition of the word, ‘brbr’, may be a way to emphasize that it is not simply east but furthest east, eastern-most or ‘east-east’. Finally, the ‘Ta’ at the end may signify a land and not a people. As others have alluded to above, this was then extrapolated to refer to geographically disparate peoples with the same or similar characteristics and culture as the people of brbrta.

Couple of other interesting things - it’s clear when you expound on this further that Br or ‘Bari’ in the Somali language and perhaps other related languages means ‘to come out of/to start’ or something similar. @The alchemist cites the word barbar above, or ‘barbaar’ as meaning youth. This is related to the Somali expression ‘ku barbaaray’ meaning ‘started out’, ‘learned’, ‘child’, or something to that effect, so clearly a related term with a similar etymology and meaning to ‘Bari’ and ‘Br’.

The Greeks also seem to usually use the term ‘Barbarian’ or ‘Barbaroi’ usually but not always for lands to their east as well. Among these are the Persians. The Romans usually referred to their Germanic neighbors directly to their east as barbarians. Perhaps they had an understanding of the term as referring to their East?

This stuff about it referring to the sound of a language doesn’t really make sense to me. The only place I’ve seen that mentioned is with regard to Julius Caesar referring to the Gauls as barbarians because their language sounded like sheep’s blaring to him. Seems like an old trope to me.

 

[Maakhri2024]

I propose that this word actually means furthest land east on the continent or just ‘east-land’. The Somali word for east is ‘Bari’, which sounds very similar, but why is that significant? In Somali ‘Bari’ isn’t simply ‘East’, it comes from the word ‘Waa-Bari’ or ‘Waaq-Bari’, the place where the sun rises. It is basically the land of the rising sun (similar to Japan which is even further east). For the Egyptians this would have been significant because they worshipped the sun as the god Ra. They even referred to the land of punt as the ‘land of the gods’ which actually makes more sense if we consider it as the place where their sun god came out of or ‘rose’ every day. The repetition of the word, ‘brbr’, may be a way to emphasize that it is not simply east but furthest east, eastern-most or ‘east-east’. Finally, the ‘Ta’ at the end may signify a land and not a people. As others have alluded to above, this was then extrapolated to refer to geographically disparate peoples with the same or similar characteristics and culture as the people of brbrta.

Couple of other interesting things - it’s clear when you expound on this further that Br or ‘Bari’ in the Somali language and perhaps other related languages means ‘to come out of/to start’ or something similar. @The alchemist cites the word barbar above, or ‘barbaar’ as meaning youth. This is related to the Somali expression ‘ku barbaaray’ meaning ‘started out’, ‘learned’, ‘child’, or something to that effect, so clearly a related term with a similar etymology and meaning to ‘Bari’ and ‘Br’.

The Greeks also seem to usually use the term ‘Barbarian’ or ‘Barbaroi’ usually but not always for lands to their east as well. Among these are the Persians. The Romans usually referred to their Germanic neighbors directly to their east as barbarians. Perhaps they had an understanding of the term as referring to their East?

This stuff about it referring to the sound of a language doesn’t really make sense to me. The only place I’ve seen that mentioned is with regard to Julius Caesar referring to the Gauls as barbarians because their language sounded like sheep’s blaring to him. Seems like an old trope to me.

Excellent analysis. This is the same analysis that came to my mind years ago, but something prevented me from accepting this linguistic analysis.

The repetition of the word, ‘brbr’, may be a way to emphasize that it is not simply east but furthest east, eastern-most or ‘east-east’. Finally, the ‘Ta’ at the end may signify a land and not a people.

The repetition of the word is called Reduplication .
Reduplication ( repetition) has the effect of reinforcing and emphasizing .
dag → dagdag
kab → kabkab
qar → qarqar
hal → hal hal
mid → mid mid

Reduplication is a common feature of the Somali language, used in several ways, including:
Plural nouns
af ( singular ) → afaf ( plural ) .

Somali ideophones ( Onomatopoeia ) :
qac → qacqac

 

[Maakhri2024]

I propose that this word actually means furthest land east on the continent or just ‘east-land’. The Somali word for east is ‘Bari’, which sounds very similar, but why is that significant? In Somali ‘Bari’ isn’t simply ‘East’, it comes from the word ‘Waa-Bari’ or ‘Waaq-Bari’, the place where the sun rises. It is basically the land of the rising sun (similar to Japan which is even further east). For the Egyptians this would have been significant because they worshipped the sun as the god Ra. They even referred to the land of punt as the ‘land of the gods’ which actually makes more sense if we consider it as the place where their sun god came out of or ‘rose’ every day. The repetition of the word, ‘brbr’, may be a way to emphasize that it is not simply east but furthest east, eastern-most or ‘east-east’. Finally, the ‘Ta’ at the end may signify a land and not a people. As others have alluded to above, this was then extrapolated to refer to geographically disparate peoples with the same or similar characteristics and culture as the people of brbrta.

Couple of other interesting things - it’s clear when you expound on this further that Br or ‘Bari’ in the Somali language and perhaps other related languages means ‘to come out of/to start’ or something similar. @The alchemist cites the word barbar above, or ‘barbaar’ as meaning youth. This is related to the Somali expression ‘ku barbaaray’ meaning ‘started out’, ‘learned’, ‘child’, or something to that effect, so clearly a related term with a similar etymology and meaning to ‘Bari’ and ‘Br’.

The Greeks also seem to usually use the term ‘Barbarian’ or ‘Barbaroi’ usually but not always for lands to their east as well. Among these are the Persians. The Romans usually referred to their Germanic neighbors directly to their east as barbarians. Perhaps they had an understanding of the term as referring to their East?

This stuff about it referring to the sound of a language doesn’t really make sense to me. The only place I’ve seen that mentioned is with regard to Julius Caesar referring to the Gauls as barbarians because their language sounded like sheep’s blaring to him. Seems like an old trope to me.

barbar : Dhinac. ld berber .
barbar : side, edge .

Why doesn't the word ( Barbar / berber ) come from the extreme geographical location of Somalia?

As we know and see, the Somali peninsula is located at the edge of the African continent, in the shape of a horn.

The problem is that I am not completely convinced by this linguistic justification:
why were the North African tribes and the European tribes (the Germanic tribes) called Berbers if the meaning of the word Berber is " edge / side " ?

 

[Galool]

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:
View attachment 301312
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.

It also means sides in Somali, like to put things side by side. Compare = "is barbar dhig".

Or lol I learned it can mean side when that barbar song went viral, if you remember that. So it seems there is a similar meaning for it in Somali too.

Also, I dont think "barbar" as in young man/youth is regional. I remember the youth group in Dir Dhabe and Sitti called themselves "Barbarta". Or how people say to young ones soo barbar. It is standard Somali.

 

[Maakhri2024]

As others have alluded to above, this was then extrapolated to refer to geographically disparate peoples with the same or similar characteristics and culture as the people of brbrta.

𓃀 Uniliteral phonogram for b.
𓃀 Logogram for bw (“place, thing”).
𓂋 Uniliteral phonogram for r .
𓏏 Logogram for t .

𓃀 𓂋 𓃀 𓂋 𓏏 = brbrta .
As we know, the hieroglyphic writing of ancient Egypt does not contain vowels, it is only made up of consonants.

This word (brbrta) can be read as: Barbarta or Barberta or Barbarta or buurbuurta and so on.

gurgur v. carry ~ transport (things) one by
one .
guur v. move away, migrate; move
house, change residence
guurguurtu .

b → g
brbrta → grgrtu → guurguurtu ( Reer guuraa )​

brbrta ( buurbuurta / guurguurtu ) means those who are on the move (nomads).​

Wandering and nomadic life is common among the Berber tribes of North Africa and the Germanic Berber tribes of Europe and the nomads of the Horn of Africa.
​