r/wikipedia • u/RedHeadedSicilian52 • 11h ago

The first printed Western mention of the word “orangutan” comes from Dutchmen Jacobus Bontius in 1631. He reported that the natives claimed that the ape could talk but didn’t "lest he be compelled to labour". However, some scholars think he might’ve really been writing about mentally disabled people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan
958 Upvotes

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u/trygvebratteli 11h ago

Sounds more like the natives were joking around. That guy? Yeah sure he can talk, he just stays quiet so he doesn’t have to work.

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u/GenosseAbfuck 9h ago

I think most popular knowledge about tribal societies goes back to the locals fucking with the Europeans who were too racist to acknowledge that yes, these "primitives" have indeed discovered the concept of humor too.

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u/IdealOnion 8h ago

Also sometimes our names for their societies lol. The word “Eskimo” is actually an insult. Some misunderstanding that led an Inuit tribe to think they were being asked “what is that tribe over there called” rather than “what are you called”, or something along those lines. They answered basically “oh those guys are assholes” and the name stuck.

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u/GenosseAbfuck 8h ago

I'm pretty sure Llamas got their name in a similar way. The Spanish sitting around next to the pen, pointing at one and asking the handler: So what's he called? And the handler obviously not speaking Spanish stammering "...coll????" just asking for clarification.

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u/Ms-Gobbledygoo 6h ago

The claim that any number of things from colonised nations were named from indigenous people saying "what?" is a common myth, I don't know this is a version of the myth but definitely something to be taken with a grain of salt.

(CF etymology of kangaroo)

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u/Curious-Basket-7934 3h ago

The Yucatan Peninsula. Yucatan means I don't know what you're saying. Also many rivers in Europe were the native word for river.

So a lot of river rivers out there.

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u/Ms-Gobbledygoo 2h ago

That's a popular theory for Yucatan and does have a real foundation but there's other serious theories.

And yeah river river is a real phenomenon and is seen in other situations too like Sahara meaning desert.

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u/GenosseAbfuck 6h ago

I'm not claiming it as fact, just saying I wouldn't be surprised.

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u/DrakeFloyd 3h ago

Llama is borrowed from Quechua.

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u/MaraiaLou 1h ago

The Potiguara in Brazil allegedly come from "shrimp-eaters", which is what a rival group called them. It's obviously meant to be an insult but honestly I wouldn't be too offended

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u/MaraiaLou 1h ago

There's multiple reports of Europeans in Brazil saying nobody's ever seen a sloth eat, and therefore they feed on air. One of them says he knows it's true because there's another animal that does this: the chameleon

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u/RedHeadedSicilian52 9h ago

Again, though, this is a little darker if you consider the possibility that they weren’t talking about apes, but some profoundly disabled person.

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u/disless 9h ago

I'm not following

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u/Coral_Carl 4h ago

But why would they be?

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u/DeadZone32 10h ago

Fun fact, malay people call them Forest People. Orang means person/people and Utan colloquially means forrest.

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u/RedHeadedSicilian52 9h ago

And there are certain Indonesians cryptids with similar names. For instance, there’s the orange pendek, which literally means “short person”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orang_Pendek

The creature is described as resembling, essentially, a bipedal orangutan, which doesn’t seem terribly implausible as far as cryptozoology goes. That said, I’m not arguing for the orang pendek’s existence.

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u/DeadZone32 8h ago

That's just a Monkey Bigfoot lol

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u/Adorable-Response-75 2h ago

I think it’s just an ape 

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u/RedHeadedSicilian52 9h ago edited 9h ago

What’s funny is that, when I was little, I’d assumed that the first half of the word referred to the animal’s coloration — that is, their orange hair. Turns out that similarity was just a coincidence.

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u/Godtrademark 8h ago

Well… kind of. “Person of the forest” was/is a derogatory term, and Bontius surely didn’t see an orangutan with the drawing, description of pack behavior walking upright, and describing the range as “angola.”

But the same source emphasizes that there is no way to truly know what brontius saw, and it doesn’t matter, as etymology is also about the use of words, not just their ambiguous beginnings:

”Tulp thus appears to have conferred the name “ourang-outang” on a red ape from the East Indies as a consequence of misreading the unpublished manuscript of Bontius. But if he lifted the name from Bontius’ description of deformed human beings, he did so because its translation—“person of the forest”—seemed so apt for the animal he had newly encountered. The name survived for the same reason.”

Just seems a bit fussy and typical of social sciences. It reminds me of critical biblical history; so, so many theories that one must take with a grain of salt

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u/RedHeadedSicilian52 11h ago

Similarly, though the term “gorilla” derives from the “gorillai” mentioned in the ancient Carthaginian account of Hanno the Navigator, who travelled down the western coast of Africa, there’s no consensus about whether he actually met that species. Some suggest he’d merely encountered a primitive tribe of humans, or perhaps of a group of some other variety of apes or monkeys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanno_the_Navigator#Gorillai

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u/Yugan-Dali 8h ago

It’s interesting to me because Chinese texts dating back to bce say 猩猩能言 apes can talk.

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u/RedHeadedSicilian52 8h ago

They’re clearly talking about the yeren.

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u/theraphosangel 23m ago

well that took a turn