kangaroo

[geoquest]

what does kangaroo mean?

[Janetx]

Feel free to correct me if I am wrong. I learned recently that when early settlers to Australia decided that they needed to learn from the "Australians", i.e. Aboriginals, and that they tried to learn from one tribe. This tribe's word for "meat" was "kangaroo" and, as the only meat running around the area was a kangaroo, the settlers assumed that the name of the animal was kangaroo. There were/are quite a number of languages and, consequently, confusion reigned when other tribes pointed to such things as sheep and called them kangaroo.

[homer]

It's tricky. The word itself dates to at least 1770 when both Captain Cook and his shipboard botanist Sir Joseph Banks recorded it as an Aboriginal name for the animal.

Some folk now claim that kangaroo meant 'I don't understand', and when the British explorers asked the name of the animal, the Aborigines replied 'Kangaroo'. But this is a pretty recent explanation and there is not a lot of evidence to back it up.

It is true that many later explorers found many different aboriginal names for the animal (none of them kangaroo). Some feel it could have been misheard by Cook and derives from the Guugu Yimidhirr language of north-east Australia where ganjurru has been used to describe the marsupial.