Conference thebay::joyoflex

    Either you or I have the story a bit garbled. The way I heard it, the
    European asked an Australian Aborigine `What's that?', pointing to
    a xxxxx and xxxxx is the `don't know'.
    
    b
    

    There are lots of stories like that.  I read once that explorers in the
    Philippines asked some local boaters where they were and received the
    replly, "We are rowing", said to be, in their language, Luzon.
    
    I'm pretty sure of the truth of this one:  My four-greats grandfather
    jumped ship in Philadelphia and slipped ashore with several other
    European refugees.  When confronted on the shore, they accounted for
    their presence saying, "We are fishers", whereupon my distinguished
    ancestor dropped his Hungarian name and took the name George Fisher.

That reminds me of a joke...

A Jewish immigrant arriving in the U.S. from Eastern Europe was told by his
friend that his name was too hard for Americans to pronounce, and that he
should use a different name.  By the time the immigration officials asked
him his name, he'd forgotten the name his friend had recommended, so he
replied "Shoyn fergessen" (I've forgotten already).

So they put him down as Sean Ferguson.

    Thank you .1
    
    I had a feeling it was connected with Aborigines -- but Aborigine comes
    from the Latin, ab origine.
    
    It is of course 'kangaroo' which is the Aborigine word for 'don't know'.
    
    Nick

The name of the Indian tribe on the old F-Troop TV show was the Heckawe, as
in "Where the heck are we?"

    G'day,
    
    Minor nit... in the story, Kangaroo, would have been the word for
    "don't know' in *one of the* aborigine languages. Australia has/had
    many aborigine languages...
    
    As an aside, you may be aware that immigrants from the UK are known as
    'Poms'or 'Pommies'. The UK version of why this is so, is not generally
    re-told, but I shall  do so now...
    
    
    The UK immigrant arrived, sampled Australian beer, got very sunburnt,
    looked for food and found a 'pie floater', got called a 'ba***rd'
    
    and went to the harbourside, sat on a rock and with a shrug of sadness
    said "Po' Me!"
    
    
    
    ;-)
    
    
    derek

    Thanks, Derek.
    
    I had a suspicion KANGAROO was the word, but I didn't want to go
    on record with `Kangaroo is Aborigine for "I don't know"' when that
    (my, supposed, statement) is so implausible; they _lived_ with
    the things - surely they'd have a word. It hadn't occurred to me
    that there were many aboriginal languages, and that every aboriginal
    individual didn't necessarily come from a culture that needed a
    word for kangaroos.
    
    Silly of me. If a little place like Spain has a handful of languages 
    (not all of them related even to Latin), Australia must have dozens
    (well, more than one).
    
    b
    

    The way I heard the Aborigine/Kangaroo story, a European asked an
    Aborigine "What's that animal?" to which the loacl replied "I don't
    understand you." which in his language came out "Kangaroo."
    
    					andrew

    G'day,
    
    Not heard that one (though it makes more contextual sense)... Kangaroos
    are pretty widespread through Australia, but around Sydney, there would
    have been more wallabies and walleroos than kangaroos since they tend
    to be more of the arid inland. So if the native was being used as a
    guide...then again, there was no breakthrough across the mountains
    until the 1800s and so white folk did not see kangaroos until later, I
    guess. Except maybe in outpost penal colonies such as Port Macquarie
    and Brisbane..
    
    I guess I'd need to think this through
    
    derek
    
    

    The way I heard the story was that it was Captain Cook or his crew
    that asked the question and got the "kangaroo" reply.  Where did
    Cook land in Australia?
    
    ed

    The thread of this discussion makes me wonder about some names
    for some isolated tribes which translate as "the people" or "people".
    Could it be that upon being asked who they were ( in what manner or in 
    what language I do not even try to conjecture) they answered, in
    effect, "we're people". The interlocutor thinks of this as designating
    a tribal name and records it thus. The respondant thinks the questioner
    wants to know what they are ( people, or trees, or anteaters). Is this
    plausible? It's fun to think of it this way, since one pictures the
    respondant's state of mind as being " we're people, just like you.
    Obviously if you're asking I will tell you, because I am a polite
    person, but you must be awfully stupid to be asking"
    
    Or is it more likely the case, (as I have believed all along),
    that the isolated tribe *did* think of itself as "people" in the
    sense that they were the only such class of being in the world as they
    knew it, and they had no need to think of themselves as a specific
    sub-group, and so had no word for themselves other than the general
    term. 
    
    I have forgotten any of the specific "tribal" names which function in
    this dual way. Does anyone have them?
    
    regards,
    Bruce  
    

    Inuit is one such tribal name.  They are usually called Eskimoes, but
    Eskimo is an old Iroquois word meaning "eater of fish."  "Inuit" means
    "people."

    In "Little Big Man" the Cheyennes consistently call themselves "the
    human beings" to distinguish themselves from all others.
    
    

    G'day,
    
     Cook landed at what was to become Botany Bay, now a southern suburb of
    Sydney. He then sailed north and went ashore in a number of places up
    the E coast. Phillip returned in 1788 to Botany Bay, realised that the
    bay was not as sheltered as Cook had thought so he sailed north to Port
    Jackson and in to Farm Cove where Sydney was established on the outlet
    of the Tank Stream, a fresh water outlet.
    
    derek

    "Kung Bushmen call all strangers 'zhu dole' which means ... 'dangerous
    person'; they call all non-Bushmen 'zo si' which means "animals without
    hooves" because they say non-Bushmen are angry and dangerous like lions
    and hyenas. But Kung Bushmen call themselves 'zhu twa si', the harmless
    people. 'Twa' means 'just' or 'only' in the sense that you would say
    'It was just the wind' or 'It is only me'."
    
    		Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, writing about South African
    Bushmen.
    
    	I have heard that "Welsh" is derived from the Anglo-Saxon for
    "foreigner".
    
    

    Dave
    
    NSOED to the rescue on the origin of the word 'Welsh'
    
    It started as the Latin word 'volcae' meaning 'a Celtic people of
    unknown origin' and then mutated to a Germanic word meaning 'foreign'
    which in their terms was either Celtic or Roman.
    
    Then it went through:
    	Old Norse		Valir
    	Old High German		Wal(a)h
    	Old English		W(e)alh
    	Gaulish	French		Valskr
    	Walloon			Waalsch
    	German			Welsch
    	Old High German		Wal(a)hisc, Walesc
    	West Saxon		Wilisc, Wylisc
    	Anglian and Kentish	Welisc, W�lisc
    
    Nick

    Re .16: The Volcae were one of the main and most well known Celtic tribe
    of Gaul. It was divided in several branches, some of which emigrated up
    to Galatia in Asia Minor. The two main branches of the Volcae were the
    Tectosages and the Arecomices. As far as is known, they're no relations
    to the Italiote Volsques against whom the early Roman fought several
    wars.
    	Which brings to my mind another case of a (not at all isolated in
    that case) tribe that called itself "the People", namely the Teutones,
    a Celtic (although the Romans thought them Germans) tribe that, along
    with another Celtic tribe, the Cimbri, invaded the Roman state and was
    defeated by Marius (Caesar's uncle and Sulla's rival) in the late
    republican time. Teutones is a Celtic name meaning "the people",
    cognate with the Celtic god name "Teutates" and with the old Irish
    "Tuath" as in "Tuatha De Danann" or "People of the Goddess Danu". It's
    ironic that the mistake of the Roman authors about the Teutones' origin
    has brought the adjective Teutonic to mean German rather than Celt in
    our languages (there's little doubt about the fact that the Teutones
    and the Cimbri were Celts, considering that not only their names are
    Celtic, but also that all the known names of their chiefs are also
    Celtic; they were probably displaced from Southern Denmark by the first
    Germans migrating South from Scandinavia).
    			Denis.

    re 14, 16
    
    "Potted" means "preserved", as does "canned"--but I believe
    the process is different.  So a "potted" history is one which
    is small and ready-to-use anytime.
    
    Saxon "welisc" may be cognate with a Latin word, but that
    list of languages falsly implies that Old High Norse is a
    descendant of Latin and an ancestor of English.  Given the
    way things work, I'd guess that the original Indo-European
    meant "foreign" and it was specialized by the Latins.  I
    could go look at my wife's OED, but I won't.
    
    		-John Bishop

Re .11: I think a more reasonable scenario for how a people's word for 
"people" became others' word for that people's tribe is as an answer 
to the question, "Who are you?"  An isolated tribe would tend to 
reply, "We're people, of course," not so much to explain what they are 
or stress their similarity to the strangers, but just repeating their 
own usual way of referring to themselves, much as you might say, 
"We're us, of course."

About "Welsh": it's interesting (in case I haven't mentioned this yet) 
that the German Swiss refer to the French Swiss as "die Welschen".

re misc.:

>         another Celtic tribe, the Cimbri

     And the Welsh call themselves Cymr[u|y] - could this be from Cimbri
(or could Cimbri be from this)?

     A friend of mine had a theory about the different names for German
in different languages - that first encountering German tribe X led to
calling the Germans X.

	the Germans call themselves Deutsch (akin to Gothic
	thiuda people)

	the French call them Allemand (found in the Xwebster
	entry for allemande)

	we call them German (from Latin Germanus - which
	appears to have once simply meant tribal or "having
	the same parents") - I don't know why English
	speakers picked this

	the Celts in the Isles called them Sassenachs 
	(Saxons) when they invaded

(I realize I haven't built a great case for my friend's hypothesis, so)
Anybody know the Slavic, Baltic, Magyar, etc. names for Germans?

    There were a number of tribal organizations, among them
    the Hermanni, Suevi, Franks, Burgundi and on and on.
    Some of these names have survived.  Note that we have
    Latin (etc.) forms (Hermanni) from old texts, not the
    original Proto-German form (probably "Gxermanne", with
    "x" being a voiced velar fricative).
    
    "Allemani" means "all people"--it was apparantly a union
    of smaller groups.   Other than "Deutsch"/"Teutos"...,
    which has already been mentioned, I don't know any other
    translations.
    
    Russian uses "Nemtsi", in origin "those who can't talk",
    i.e. non-Russian speakers.
    
    		-John Bishop

    Of course we mustn't forget the Greeks, who called all non-Greeks
    "barbaros."
    					andrew

    Re .20:
>     And the Welsh call themselves Cymr[u|y] - could this be from Cimbri
>(or could Cimbri be from this)?
    
    	I can't say I'm competent to discuss it, but I've read in several
    different places that the root for Cymru and Cimbri is the same.
    
    Re .20, .21: I think the Italians call the Germans "Tedesco", again
    from the Teutones (there's also a French little used adjective
    "Tudesque" that means German). The tribe confederation that gave the
    French word for German ("Allemands") is known in French as the Alamans;
    I think the Spanish word also comes from it, but I'm not sure.
    
    	I'm pretty sure that the Germanic word Thiuda is cognate with
    Teutones. It figures in the name of the Ostrogothic kings Theodoric,
    Thiudahad and Theodebert (I think the last one was Frankish rather than
    Gothic, but I've a memory blank there).
    			Denis.

On a similar line, KIMONO is the Japanese word for CLOTHING.
There are lots of words to identify different kimonos.

In Hungarian (magyarul), "German" is "n�met", as in Russian and many 
other slavonic languages it's "nyemyetski" or similar (mentioned before).

I must admit I hadn't known (not speaking any Russian) that the work 
came from "those who can't speak", but it is true that in Hungarian 
"n�ma" means "dumb".

    Re .24
    
>On a similar line, KIMONO is the Japanese word for CLOTHING.
>There are lots of words to identify different kimonos.
    
    Although that is literally true, people wouldn't quite understand
    if you refer to a western-style dress or business suit or jeans or
    whatever as a kimono.  Although similar formations are used with
    their literal meanings (tabemono = any kind of food, norimono =
    any kind of vehicle, etc.), for some reason kimono is only used
    for one or two classical styles of clothing.
    
    Also Japanese, like classical Greeks, used to refer to all foreigners
    as barbarians (in particular, southern barbarians).
    
    -- Norman Diamond

    Patricide is killing your father...
    
    Matricide is killing your mother...
    
    Infanticide is killing your child...
    
    Homicide is killing someone...
    
    Fratricide is killing your brother...
    
    What's the word for killing your sister????

    I'd suppose it was something like "sororicide," following the parallel
    constructions of "fraternity" and "sorority."
    
    Um... What do you need this word *for*? he asked a little anxiously.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

>    Um... What do you need this word *for*? he asked a little anxiously.

Earl, I wouldn't worry too much, unless you're his sister.

Clay
    

    .28 -- What do I need the word for??
    
    The need emerged from a discussion at home with our
    children.
    
    Our daughter had established a bigger list than the 
    one I cited, which, gleefully, covered the killing 
    of her brothers.  So they then asked about the 
    killing of their sister.
    
    I have pointed out the indefensible nature of any 
    sort of '-cide', but the boys still want to know.

    re .30
    
    > I have pointed out the indefensible nature of any
    > sort of '-cide', but the boys still want to know.
    
    Insecticide is indefensible?

	.28 is correct.