When Chinese voyagers first saw the kangaroo they did not adopt the Australian name but named it in Chinese the way it looked to them – “pocket rat” or “great rat with a pocket”.
The Yoruba of West Africa, unused to zebras, called them, with some logic, “striped horses”.
Because of its human appearance, the orangutan of the South Asian jungles was often mistaken for a wild man living in the trees. In Malay, orang is “man” and utan is “jungle”; hence, “man of the jungle”.
Descriptive names do not always seem to fit the animal in question. In Hawaiian, a certain tiny reef fish is called humohumokunokuapuaa, and a giant fish of the deep ocean goes by the name of o.
The South American llama got its name by mistake. When the Spanish invaders saw the strange animal they asked the Indians ¿Cómo se llama? The Indians, trying to understand what the Spanish were saying, kept repeating the word llama. The Spanish took their own question as an answer, and dubbed the animal they had been calling “Indian sheep” a llama.
White people generally consider the zebra to be a white animal with black stripes while the African natives take it to be a black animal with white stripes.
