Andy Young: No kangaroos, but plenty of Stachelschweins

By Andy Young

I love getting unusual postcards, which my niece knows. That’s why, while traveling in Europe recently, she took the time to send me one featuring a yellow sign declaring, “No Kangaroos in Austria,” with the very recognizable outline of the Australian marsupial in its center.

The card made me smile, but it also made me wonder: how many of the locals, the majority of whom speak German, actually get the joke? After all, 97 percent of Austrians speak German; it’s the mother tongue of 93 percent of them.

What, I wondered, is the German word for this animal that to my knowledge is native to only one continent on Earth, and one that’s a very long way from Europe? But then, “Kangaroo” seems like a pretty uncommon word. How different could it be in other languages?

Well, thanks to an online translator, I now know that känguru is German for Kangaroo. It’s kangourou in French, canguro in Spanish and Italian, kangur in Polish, kinghar in Arabic, kangoro in Farsi, kengúra in Icelandic, and kanguru in Turkish. It’s also two symbols in Chinese that neither my computer (nor The Windham Eagle’s, apparently) has on its keyboard, although the approximate pronunciation is, allegedly, Dàishǔ.

But for my money, the languages with the best word for “kangaroo” are, among others, Swahili, Samoan, Hmong, Dinka, and Jamaican Patois, all of which refer to what we English speakers call a kangaroo as a “kangaroo.”

Another animal most Austrians would likely see only in zoos is what the folks in Turkey call a zürafa. This long-necked creature is a girafe to the French, a jirafa to Spanish speakers, a giraffa in Italian, a giraf in Danish, and a sjiraff in Norwegian. It’s a shame most standard laptop keyboards lack the capability of composing in Vietnamese, Greek, or Hindi, because the term for Giraffe in each of those languages is a real mouthful.

Thankfully not every word system is so complicated when it comes to identifying the animal with nature’s longest neck. For example, in German and in Filipino, the word for giraffe is “giraffe.”

If life were truly just, only linguists from the region unusual animals are native to would have the right to name these creatures. That’s why fair-minded people should refer to what we currently call a panda as a Xióngmāo, which is what locals call the adorable, rotund bamboo-munchers that exist in the wild solely in the mountainous region of southwestern China.

But anglophones aren’t the only group arrogant enough to make up our own words for animals not native to where we live. The word “panda” literally translates to “panda” in, among other languages, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Turkish, Danish, Kurdish, Hungarian, Portuguese, Romanian, Javanese, Japanese, and Susu, a tongue spoken in West Africa that’s one of the official languages of Guinea. Don’t use the word “Susu” in Indonesia, though. Its meaning there is different, and quite vulgar, apparently.

Common sense dictates that one should never startle a mofeta in Mexico, a mouffette in Quebec, a haisunäätä in Helsinki, or a skunk in Sweden, Germany, Samoa, and every English-speaking nation on the planet. Similarly, smart people know better than to pet an animal known as a yamārashi in Japanese, a dikobraz in Russian, a puerco espín in Spanish, a stachelschwein in German, a porc-épic in French, a kirpi in Uzbek and Azerbaijani, a pokio in Hawaiian, a porkopi in Papiamento, and a porcupine in English.

It’s too bad that porcupines live where my niece just visited, because I’ll bet “No Stachelschweins in Austria” postcards would sell like hotcakes in Vienna to tourists and locals alike! <