ORIGIN OF THE TERM “BARBARIAN”

The concept of “foreigner” in Chinese had always been ambiguous in its patterns and substantial semantic connotations. No matter how multitudinous and substantial they used to be, in the vast corpus of Western literature, they were matched with the single term “barbarian" for a long time. Regardless of the unique connotations of each Chinese term, the whole idea of “Chinese foreigner” was constricted to a dichotomy on the civilized-barbarian fault line. This paper argues the basic idea of the term "barbarian"