kangaroo

Any Aussies around?

This is what I got in an email "did you know that?". Could there be any trouth in it?
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<hr>When the English settlers landed in Australia, they noticed a strange animal that jumped extremely high and far. They asked the aboriginal people using body language and signs trying to ask them about this animal. They responded with ’’Kan Ghu Ru’’ the english then adopted the word kangaroo. What the aboriginal people were really trying to say was <hr></blockquote>

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<hr>‘’we don’t understand you’’, ‘’ Kan Ghu Ru’’.<hr></blockquote>

I have heard variations on this story for places and creatures all over the world, so I find it immediately suspect.

No truth to that, even though I did hear it from my father.

The Online Etymological Dictionary says:

1770, used by Capt. Cook and botanist Joseph Banks, supposedly an aborigine word from northeast Queensland, Australia, usually said to be unknown now in any native language. However, according to Australian linguist R.M.W. Dixon ("The Languages of Australia," Cambridge, 1980), the word probably is from Guugu Yimidhirr (Endeavour River-area Aborigine language) /gaNurru/ "large black kangaroo."

"In 1898 the pioneer ethnologist W.E. Roth wrote a letter to the Australasian pointing out that gang-oo-roo did mean 'kangaroo' in Guugu Yimidhirr, but this newspaper correspondence went unnoticed by lexicographers. Finally the observations of Cook and Roth were confirmed when in 1972 the anthropologist John Haviland began intensive study of Guugu Yimidhirr and again recorded /gaNurru/." [Dixon]

The Endeavour River region was where Cook and Banks first noted the word.

"Kangaroo court", by the way, according to the Online Etym Dict "is Amer.Eng., first recorded 1853 in a Texas context (also mustang court), from notion of proceeding by leaps. "

What I thought was strange is that it can't be verified. There are no sure sources. And it's been only a couple of hunderd years back.

i don't know that it's strange: there were an estimated 200 distinct aboriginal languages in use in australia at the time of british colonisation; the figure is now around 20. it's quite possible that the language or languages from which 'kangaroo' originated no longer exists.

so, perhaps not strange that no sure sources remain, but certainly sad.

btw: the OP (in various guises) is a fairly common joke here in australia. as in, 'did you know that 'kangaroo' really means, 'what the hell language are you speaking, you crazy whitey?!' etc.

The OED discusses the word's origins at remarkable length:

Stated to have been the name in a native Australian lang.

Cook and Banks believed it to be the name given to the animal by the natives at Endeavour River, Queensland, and there is later affirmation of its use elsewhere. On the other hand, there are express statements to the contrary (see quots. below), showing that the word, if ever current in this sense, was merely local, or had become obsolete.

The common assertion that it really means 'I don't understand' (the supposed reply of the native to his questioner) seems to be of recent origin and lacks confirmation. (See Morris Austral English s.v.) 1770 Cook Jrnl. (1893) 224 (Morris) (Aug. 4) The animals which I have before mentioned, called by the Natives Kangooroo or Kanguru. 1770 J. Banks Jrnl. (1896) 301 (Aug. 26) The largest [quadruped] was called by the natives kangooroo. 1787 Anderson in Cook's Voy. (1790) IV. 1295 We found, that the animal called kangooroo, at Endeavour River, was known under the same name here [in Tasmania]. 1792 J. Hunter Port Jackson (1793) 54 The animal 'called the kangaroo (but by the natives patagorong) we found in great numbers. 1793 W. Tench Compl. Acc. Port Jackson 171 The large, or grey kanguroo, to which the natives [of Port Jackson] give the name of Pat-ag-a-ran. Note, Kanguroo was a name unknown to them for any animal, until we introduced it. 1834 Threlkeld Austral. Gram. (Hunter's River) 87 (Morris) Kóng-go-róng, the Emu_likely the origin of the barbarism, kangaroo, used by the English, as the name of an animal called Mo-a-ne. 1835 T. B. Wilson Narr. Voy. World 211 (ibid.) They [natives of the Darling Range, W.A.] distinctly pronounced 'kangaroo' without having heard any of us utter the sound. 1850 Jrnl. Ind. Archipelago IV. 188 (Kangaroo.) It is very remarkable that this word, supposed to be Australian, is not to be found as the name of this singular marsupial animal in any language of Australia 'I have this on the authority of my friend Captain King.

I don't mean in any way to run down nette, who is very knowledgeable about Australia, but I would suggest posting this question on the Australia/New Zealand branch. There are lots of people there who would jump into this one.

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<hr>jump into this one. <hr></blockquote> no pun intended, i'm sure :-D :-D

Yes I've heard that one before, I remember my linguistics lecturer at uni telling that story, probably not true but funny nonetheless. I heard another funny story about the meaning of the word: Australia" from an Indonesian friend of mine. As we know it comes from "Terra Australia" meaning "Great Southern Land”, but he had an interesting take. He said that captain cook had a servant from one of the outlying islands of Indonesia. Captain Cook spotted Australia and asked the servant if he knew what the name of the islands was, and he servant answered Au si ta lia, which meant "I can't see". I looked at my collection of the local languages of Indonesia and indeed in a few of these languages the word Au means I, ta means no and lia means see. It's purely coincidental of course and I imagine that it was either a group of linguists or Indonesians who discovered this similarity and fabricated this funny story.

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.