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You don't need someone to teach you tha language inorder to learn it. All that is required is you spending the skill ranks. You can explain it however you want flavor/storywise, but he can definitely do it.
Some examples of explanations:
1). The PC apparently has a knack for languages and has learned bits and pieces from the thassilonian inscriptions they've encountered previously
2). The PC had some prior experience with the language in the past and they just realized that it's the same language.
3). The PC has been trying to figure it out as they've been travelling and has finally hit a breakthrough,
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Hog-piling a bit but RAW, he spends a point, he gets a language. It's not ridiculous to challenge that assumption on plausibility but (being a bit rule-lawyerly - that is too a word!) that would seem to be a restriction/caveat that should be explained when linguistics is first taken. Barbarian player seems well within his(?) rights to assume it works as described in the rulebook.
One underlying assumption with skills (all, not just linguistics) is that the pc has been working on skill X for some time, the arrival of the skill point is just acknowledging a threshold reached - not that the pc didn't know a thing about nobility before yesterday but after putting a skill point in Knowledge (nobility) today suddenly knows the whole royal lineage. You can establish some system where the players indicate what skills they are working on in advance of the next level jump or only let them add points to skills they actually used since the last level jump, etc. but that type of approach seems unnecessarily bureaucratic (to me.) Certainly more realistic but also more overhead.
I would also observe that Quink should absolutely be functional in Thassilonian - hard to see how he could be one of the region's known experts on Thassilon without it (regardless of how much other Thassilonian scholars think he's a nut.) It's reasonable to assume he's the only person in Sandpoint who is. Thassilonian is a rarely known, obscure language, not a dead one. It's also reasonable (despite what I wrote above) that you ask the player for an narrative explanation for how his character would learn Thassilonian. But if the pc's have introduced Quink to the ruins they find in the course of Book 1 (or promise to do so) he should have an extremely positive view of them and be more than willing to help teach the language.
I'm pretty sure the anniversary edition player's guide includes a campaign trait that grants fluency in Thassilonian. I took that to pretty definitively mean you can learn it.
It's pretty much essential someone in the party can speak read / write Thassilonian in the later parts of the AP. Having said that, it's even more useful for the character who can to have strong knowledge skills in eg: Arcana, History etc. And also read magic, spellcraft, and so on.
As Latrecis suggests: Brodert Quink makes an enthusiastic teacher of the language.
In my campaign, the alchemist player religiously collected all sorts of Thassilonian writings, beginning under the glassworks, and then began spending downtime with Quink. A couple levels later, he decided to spend the point in linguistics, so it was very logical.
Have your barbarian state (retroactively) that he's spent time studying the documents and speaking with Quink, and Bob's your uncle!
Or, if he's not at all bookish, say that he had a dream where an ancient sage appeared and spoke to him, leaving him with this sudden amazing knowledge.
Any old pretext will work.
In the campaign I'm in we're treating ancient thassilonian as a secret language more or less. But we have a player who is a scholar of an thassilon and had the campaign trait so that gives him a reason to feel special. Hasn't detracted from my experience.
Abyssal would be the mostly likely language of any Lamashtu material. You could just ret-con that... the PCs could have made a mistake identifying it initially?
Wouldn't it be funny if they thought they were learning Ancient Thassilonian, when in fact they had learnt Abyssal? Imagine their surprise when they try to use it and some slithering shuddersome tentacular horror from beyond the grip of reality shows up.
Bwahaha!