kangaroo：一個怎麼也趕不走的誤傳

There's a story that many people love to tell. When Captain James Cook and his crew landed in Australia, they saw a strange animal hopping around. They pointed at it and asked a local Aboriginal man what it was called. He replied, "Kangaroo", which supposedly meant "I don't understand you" in his language. The sailors wrote it down, and the name stuck. It's a great story. Unfortunately, it isn't true. In 1770, Cook's ship, the Endeavour, was damaged on a reef off the north-east coast of Australia. The crew spent several weeks on shore, near what is now the town of Cooktown in Queensland, repairing the ship. During that time, they met the local Guugu Yimithirr people, and the naturalist Joseph Banks recorded some of their words. One of them was "kangaroo", the name for a large animal they had seen. Two hundred years later, in the 1970s, a linguist named John Haviland studied the Guugu Yimithirr language. He found that the word gangurru really was used for a type of large grey kangaroo. So the sailors had understood perfectly well – the word simply meant what they thought it meant. Interestingly, when Europeans later used "kangaroo" in other parts of Australia, the local people there didn't recognise it. Australia had hundreds of different Aboriginal languages, and each had its own words for the animal. So the next time someone tells you that "kangaroo" means "I don't know", you can politely tell them that's just a myth.