kangaroo

Terry Pratchett uses a similar scenario in one of his books. The explorer pointed to a mountain & asked a local what it was called. The resulting word ended up on all the maps. It actually meant "it is your finger you fool" in the native language.

When I transferred from Forestry School to a Liberal Arts College, I had to catch up some philosophy courses and spent one summer studying metaphysics at a Jesuit college. I forgot almost everything about metaphysics except the long meditations by some learned fellow about the meaning of "Kangaroo"... did the original speaker mean THAT one animal, the class of animals, all animals of that particular color, that animal in that place at that time... or what? Maybe the original speaker did mean "Huh?" but the metaphyician's point seemed to be that the meaning of language is the meaning we impose on it.

Or something.

‘’ Kan Ghu Ru’’ :-)

The kernel of truth underlying the story is that Captain James Cook, the first European explorer to reach Australia in 1770, did indeed bring back news of a creature the Australian native peoples called a "kangooroo" or "ganguru."

Unfortunately, linguists cataloging the various Aboriginal languages many years later were unable to find anything like "kangaroo" in any existing native tongue. But the logical presumption is that the dialect Cook heard had simply become extinct over the intervening years. There is no evidence that "kangaroo" ever meant "I don't know," "What are you talking about," or any of the other responses supposedly given to his query

Isn't 'Kimo sabe' an example of this? (the Lone Ranger's indian sidekick from the old television show)
Native Americans had an aversion to speaking their own name out loud and when asked would either respond 'who knows' (quien sabe, en Spanish) or defer to a nearby friend to speak the name.
Then early explorers would scratch their heads and say 'damn - all these guys have the same name?'

And 'Canada', which apparently just meant village. I can't vouch for the accuracy of this though.

#13 -- There are various stories floating around about kemo sabe. But probably it means "scout". Not in any language spoken in Texas, though. In some Algonquian language like Ojibway or Potawatomi, where one of the writers had known of a Camp Kee Mo Sah Bee.