Donald Trump praised Liberian President Joseph Boakai for his strong grasp of the English language on Wednesday. But the African leader was educated in Liberia, where English is the official language.
As he hosted five African leaders at the White House, Trump asked Boakai: “Such good English, it’s beautiful. Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?”
Boakai informed Trump of his place of education, prompting Trump to express his curiosity. “That’s very interesting,” he said, “I have people at this table who can’t speak nearly as well.”
Several Liberians voiced their offense over Trump’s comment to Boakai, given the US president’s past remarks on African countries and the colonial legacy left by the US organization in Liberia.
“I felt insulted because our country is an English-speaking country,” Archie Tamel Harris, a Liberian youth advocate, told CNN.
Indeed. This sort of thing goes way back - the term “barbarian” was literally a result of Romans making fun of how non-Roman languages sounded to them (they used the onomatopoeia of “Bar Bar” to represent what they thought foreign languages sounded to them). Dismiss their language as meaningless gibber and you dismiss their thoughts as meaningless too.
This was the Greeks, not the Romans. It was used to describe non-Greek-speaking people.
The Romans took it up from the Greek “barbaros” and expanded it in meaning to include anyone without Greek or Roman traditions.