The first problem is that, "it is impossible to translate the word "barbarian" into Chinese because the concept does not exist in Chinese," meaning a single "completely generic" loanword from Greek "barbar-". "Until the Chinese borrow the word "barbarian" or one of its relatives, or make up a new word that explicitly includes the same basic ideas, they cannot express the idea of the 'barbarian' in Chinese.". The usual Standard Chinese translation of English "barbarian" is "yemanren" (), which Beckwith claims, "actually means 'wild man, savage'. That is very definitely not the same thing as 'barbarian'." Despite this semantic hypothesis, Chinese-English dictionaries regularly translate "yemanren" as "barbarian" or "barbarians." Beckwith concedes that the early Chinese "apparently disliked foreigners in general and looked down on them as having an inferior culture," and pejoratively wrote some exonyms. However, he purports, "The fact that the Chinese did not "like" foreigner Y and occasionally picked a transcriptional character with negative meaning (in Chinese) to write the sound of his ethnonym, is irrelevant."