Avon Is Derived From the Word Meaning What
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"Avon" is a Celtic word for "river" (viz Welsh afon); "llama" is the third person singular of the Spanish verb "to be called or named"; "kangaroo" (I believe) is an Aborigine term meaning "I don't know". What other names have have arisen from the apparent misunderstanding of a native's answer to a curious foreigner?
Jon Riley, London W5
- The French word 'vasistas' means fanlight or roof window and is a corruption of the German 'wass ist das' (what is that?). I was told that that German soldiers looking for Resistance fighters in wartime France would break into Parisian top-floor lodgings, point to the (open)roof window and scream 'Wass ist das!'
Moia Murphy, Paris
- In reponse to the Spanish visitor's "Where is this?" did not one native inhabitant of a South American country reply "yucatan?", meaning "What did he say?"
Eddie Keeling, Cognac, France
- Hong Kong is actually an incorrect rendition of the Cantonese name 'Honk Pong' meaning 'land of noisy cars and smelly harbour'.
Alan Moore, Honk Pong, China
- The central American peninsula Yucatan has an curious origin. When conquistadors asked the local Indian tribes what the region was called they, not surprisingly, replied "Yuka-tan" which means "I don't understand!"
Mark Dallas, London, England
- It's not quite a misunderstanding, but the Israelites under Moses found a strange food which they called "manna", which means "What is it?" (See Exodus 16:31.) They probably said, "Here, have you tried some of this wotsit?"
Martin Cooper, Newport, Isle of Wight
- All railway stations in Russia are called Vauxhalls after Russian engineers visited Vauxhall station in London to see how to design a station in the 1860's.
Korda, Prague, Czech Republic
- Further to Mr Burkitt-Gray's reply, there is a feature in Cumbria, I believe, called Torpenhow Hill. As each syllable means "Hill" the name translates as "HillHillHill Hill". Is this a record?
Christopher Brook, Leeds
- It is said that the Yucatan was so named because upon meeting the local people Columbus asked, in Spanish of course, "What is the name of this place" to which the reply, in the local language,was "Yucatan" which meant welcome.
Ian Jenkins, Nailsea, North Somerset
- I believe grey is an old (English?) word for dog - so greyhound dog becomes dogdog dog.
Tim Harrison, London
- It is said that Canada's name comes from the response to an early traveller's question, "What is this place?" He was by a village at the time and received the answer, in Iriquois, "Kanata", which means 'village'.
S. Flanagan, Toronto
- It may be apocryphal, but I once heard of a certain geological feature in Africa which, when an explorer pointed it out on a map to his guide, was given the name "Your finger, you fool" in the native dialect.
Ben Spiers, Stamford, England
- There are other apocryphal examples: for example, "Canada" is said to mean "village" in some Eastern North American language. There are a number of real cases, particularly the various non-European peoples whose name means simply "people". Bantu and Inuit are two examples. One imagines the explorers asking "What are you called?" and being told "We're people, stupid - what do we look like, aardvarks?"
Linda Gardiner, Sherborn, USA
- Wales derives from the Saxon word Walesi meaning "foreigners". So much for indigenous peoples.
D J Robinson, Wellington, New Zealand
- Paul Ludgate wonders why no animal has been accidentally named after an expletive or the local expression for "run". The answer is obvious: no foreigner has survived to relate the experience!
Ray Sefton, Walthamstow
- The last three words of Alice Holt Hurst Wood, in west Surrey, mean the same thing. Does this reflect the increasing frustration of a local Saxon trying to communicate with a Norman immigrant?
Victor Wyatt, Norwich
- There must be thousands of place names in Africa where inhabitants, having no names for the places, said things like Nairobi - Masai for "place of sour water". The trend now works the other way: a suburb of Nairobi where the British carrier corps built their barracks is now called "Kariakor".
Jake Kidde-Hansen, Watamu, Kenya
- I was told by our classics master that after the conquests of Alexander the Great, the local inhabitants gradually adopted their own variations of Greek. Subsequent travellers in the region, which included the modern Turkey, on asking peasants taking produce to market where they were going, got the reply, "Eis tan polein", ie "Up to the city". The regional accent meant they failed to recognise it as Greek and the name of the town thereafter became Istanbul.
E N Martin, Stockton-on-Tees
- On Jacques Cartier?s second voyage to Canada in 1535, he was shown the Iroquois village of Stadacona. He was told that it was "kanata", Iroquoian for "village", from which came the country?s name.
John Lyng Toronto, Canada
- I?m told that "Abidjan" is the answer French colonists in the Ivory Coast were given when they asked the locals "Where are we?" The Ivorians thought the question meant "Where have you been?" and replied: "We?ve been cutting the grass!"
Janet Hazlehurst, Dalton-in-Furness
- There is a place in Alaska called Nome because the surveyor did not know what it was called and wrote "Name?" on his form. This was later misread.
S H Lupton, Prestwich
- Ireland is full of misheard placenames. Phoenix Park is one, from the gaelic Pairc an Fionn Uisce, translated as "field of the clear water". Dublin itself comes from a mishearing of the gaelic dubh linn, or "black pool". Perhaps one on either side of the Irish sea would have been a bit much.
Gerard Siggins, Sandymount
- Just to add to the list of placenames in which some or all the parts mean the same thing, there's a Venlaw Hill in Peebles, Scotland, which translates as 'Hill Hill Hill' - Gaelic 'bheinn', Scots 'law', English 'hill'.
Dominic Watt, Leeds
- A professor of Russian and a professor of French told me separately that the French word "bistro" (which of course we now use in English) comes from the Russian for "quickly" (bweestree), which the Russian soldiers occupying Paris in 1814 said when they wished for a drink.
C Harrison, Chestertown USA
- In Britain it certainly seems popular to name grassy mounds over and over after each wave of imigrants. Near Ringwood in Hants is a place called Creechbarrow Hill, yet another hill hill hill.
Buddy Bigg, Poole, Dorset
- Lake Malawi in Africa was originally named Lake Nyasa by the first European settlers based on advice from the locals. Nyasa is Chinyanja for Lake. To add to the confusion, they named the land around it Nyasaland. Both were renamed Malawi following independence in 1964.
Stephen Foote, Cookham
- Budgerigar is apparently an aboriginal phrase meaing "good to eat".
Gordon, South Shields
- British explorers, wanting to know the Cherokee name for a river in the mountains of what is now North Carolina, pointed and asked: "What do you call that?" The Cherokees, thinking the riverbank to be the subject of the question, answered, egwanulf'ti (near the river). The explorers wrote down what they heard, naming it the Oconaluftee River, leaving us today with the Near-the-river River.
Tommy Shinn, Leicester, North Carolina
- In the province of Cordoba, Argentina, there is the small town of Fortin. The name comes from the days when, in the late 1800s, British engineers were laying a rail network across the country. The branch line which joined two main tracks, and ended at this town, was line number 14.
David Mackintosh, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- The English word bog, used to describe marshy, waterlogged land, derives from the Irish Gaelic adjective for 'soft', bog. In Gaelic, áit bhog means 'a soft place' - one presumes the English surveyor could only grasp the adjective (which, in Gaelic, follows the noun). The Gaelic word for a bog is portach.
Ruairi O hEithir, Dublin, Ireland
- Pendle Hill is another "hillhill hill" in Britain.
H Duffy, Leicester, UK
- There's a place in New Zealand called Nonoti, which sounds like a Maori word but is actually the answer, in English, to a question along the lines of "Do you know the name of this place?"
John, Wellington, New Zealand
Avon Is Derived From the Word Meaning What
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-3123,00.html