did you know that kangaroo is a aboriginal name and it means 'I DON'T KNOW?

Question

apparently someone asked a aboriginal man years back what was that animal jumping around he replied .KANGAROO. he said and ment i don't know. :~)

Answer 1

That's true...and if you cross an elephant with a rhino, you get an ELEPHINO!


Get it? " 'EL IF I NO"? .... "Hell if I know"? C'mon! Now THAT'S funny!

Answer 2

This is not true. This 'urban myth' came about because of a joke the late Sir Peter Ustinov used to tell as part of his one man show.

Here's what the VERY reliable website http://www.wordorigins.org/ has to say about it:

"The name for this antipodean quadruped dates, in English at least, to 1770 when both Captain Cook and his shipboard botanist Sir Joseph Banks recorded it as an Aboriginal name for the animal. The story goes that kangaroo meant "I don't understand," and when the British explorers asked, presumably loudly and slowly in English, what the animal was named, the Aborigines replied "Kangaroo." This fanciful story appears only relatively recently and has no supporting evidence, so it is almost certainly false.

Whether or not kangaroo is even an Aboriginal term for the animal is uncertain. Subsequent British explorers could find no trace of the Aboriginal word, instead finding that the natives called the animal by several other names. Kangaroo could have been a local name used in the Endeavor River region of Queensland that fell out of use among Aborigines (although according to the OED2, members of Cook's expedition also mentioned it being used in Tasmania), or it could have been an error by Cook and Banks. American Heritage supports Cook and Banks by claiming it comes from the Guugu Yimidhirr word ganjurru."


So, just another urban myth.

Answer 3

No, I did not know this one.

Abstract from Wikipedia:
The word kangaroo derives from the Guugu Yimidhirr (an Australian Aboriginal language) word gangurru, referring to a grey kangaroo. The name was first recorded on 4 August 1770, by Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook on the banks of the Endeavour River at the site of modern Cooktown, when HM Bark Endeavour was beached for almost 7 weeks to repair damage sustained on the Great Barrier Reef.

Kangaroo soon became adopted into standard English where it has come to mean any member of the family of kangaroos and wallabies. The belief that it means "I don't understand" or "I don't know" is a popular myth that is also applied to many other Aboriginal-sounding Australian words. Male kangaroos are called bucks, boomers or jacks; females are does, flyers, or jills and the young are joeys. The collective noun for kangaroos is a mob, troop, or court. Kangaroos are sometimes coloquially referred to as 'roos.

Answer 4

That's a common urban legend, but according to "The Straight Dope" (a column that answers questions like these), it's not true. Kangaroo is in fact from an aborigine word that means a particular kind of kangaroo. As the page listed below explains: "In the Guugu Yimidhirr language, spoken by the aboriginals of the area where Captain Cook's party recorded the term kangooroo (the original spelling), this word (more accurately pronounced something like kang-ooroo) refers to a particular species of kangaroo, namely the large black kangaroo."

Answer 5

I knew you where one with the Kangaroo, Live to ride Ride to Live eh! mate!! lmao.

Answer 6

Yes, that is accurate. Congratualtions, thankyou for those 2 points.

Answer 7

I read this when I was in the 5th grade, told the whole class (at 5th grade), everyone thought I was fooling them.

Answer 8

I think I heard about this at Discovery Channel or something.

Answer 9

No, I kangaroo that!

Answer 10

I know this park where all animals are dangaroos.