<Li> rong 戎 "weapons, armour; war, warrior; N. pr. of western tribes," "weapon; attack; war chariot; loan for tribes of the West" </Li> <Li> di 狄 "Northern Barbarians--"fire - dogs"," "name of a Northern tribe; low servant" </Li> <P> The Sino - Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus Project includes Karlgren's GSR definitions . Searching the STEDT Database finds various "a kind of" definitions for plant and animal names (e.g., you 狖 "a kind of monkey," but not one "a kind of barbarian" definition . Besides faulting Chinese for lacking a general "barbarian" term, Beckwith also faults English, which "has no words for the many foreign peoples referred to by one or another Classical Chinese word, such as 胡 hú, 夷 yí, 蠻 mán, and so on ." </P> <P> The third problem involves Tang Dynasty usages of fan "foreigner" and lu "prisoner", neither of which meant "barbarian ." Beckwith says Tang texts used fan 番 or 蕃 "foreigner" (see shengfan and shufan above) as "perhaps the only true generic at any time in Chinese literature, was practically the opposite of the word barbarian . It meant simply' foreign, foreigner' without any pejorative meaning ." In modern usage, fan 番 means "foreigner; barbarian; aborigine". The linguist Robert Ramsey illustrates the pejorative connotations of fan . </P>

Why does the definition of barbarism vary by culture and time period