Lost in Translation - Hilarious Bilingual Place Names

"I don't know what you're saying."  The Maya man was utterly bewildered.

He had just met his first Spanish conquistador. Though he didn't know it yet, this was going to prove to be bad news for his country and his people. 

For now though, all he really had to contend with was the fact that they were speaking to him in Spanish. It was not a language he had ever encountered before. Their Mayan was equally nonexistent.

All the pantomime gestures and loud, slow words were not communicating the pertinent question. "What is this place called?"  The Spaniard tried again.

The Maya man grimaced, "I'm sorry, I don't know what you're saying."

The sentence sounded like a single word to the listening Spanish. It was exotic, befitting their jungle discovery in the New World.  Believing that they had their answer, the Mayan phrase was duly recorded on the map as Península de Yucatán.

That's the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico to you and I.  It's the 'I don't know what you're saying' Peninsula to the local Maya population.

Across the I Don't Know What You're Saying Straits (more commonly known as the Yucatán Straits) is the country of Soil.

It was home to three different tribes: the Taíno, Guanajatabey and Ciboney.

Christopher Columbus called them all Indians, but only because he was terminally lost by now and remained convinced that he was in India. Nevertheless, he had to check.

The dominant Taíno people had already marginalized the other two tribes, pushing them right to the edges of the land. They were poised to take over the entire island, which they called Caobana.

Unfortunately for posterity, it wasn't a Taíno person who Columbus met first. It was one of the nomadic Guanajatabey communities, right on the Western shoreline. They couldn't conceive of an overall name for the island, let alone what this strange European was trying to ask them.

"What is this called?" Columbus asked, pointing to the ground.  Blank faces all around.  "This!  What is it?"  He grabbed a handful of soil and held it out.  "What is it called?"

"Soil?"  Proffered a wary Guanajatabey spokesperson in the local tongue.

Columbus had heard a word.  "Cuba!  It's called Cuba!"

It wasn't all Columbus blundering his way around the Americas.

In fact, all around the world, people have historically decided that the first thing that they heard had to be the place-name. What else could those silly natives possibly be trying to say?

"Windgancon."  The British scout duly recorded what he heard in response to his question about what this place was called.

It didn't seem to occur to him that, just as he couldn't understand Powhatan, the individuals grinning back at him weren't exactly fluent in English either.

Others heard it too.  They couldn't decide on the precise phonetic spelling.  Wingandacoa was one variation. Someone else, with slightly less imagination, thought he'd got 'Wingina' out of it.

Whatever the case was, it was soon dismissed. When Sir Walter Raleigh formed a colony there, he promptly renamed the whole area Virginia.  It flattered Queen Elizabeth I, aka The Virgin Queen, back home.

Which must come as a huge relief to the US population of the state, as they would otherwise have been called, "What gay clothes you're wearing!" in Powhatan.

Just to prove that it's not only North and South America where it can all go wrong, let's zoom across the Atlantic Ocean to my own country.

Anyone with even a smattering of both Welsh and English can find hilarious clues to ancient conversations dotting the landscape.

Take the River Avon.  That venerable old river is linked with William Shakespeare, as he was born on its banks in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

But look closely at the name and try to envisage the kind of conversation which must have led to it.

The Welsh for river is afon.  It's pronounced avon.  You're looking at River River (or Afon Afon).

Much further north, in the English Midlands, is Bredon Hill.  Very pretty and most definitely a hill. We know this, not only because we can look at it and say, "Yep, that's a hill," but because it tells us three times.

'Bre' comes from the Welsh bryn, meaning hill.   Don is the Saxon word for hill.  Then, just in case we haven't got the hint yet, some more recent topographer added 'hill' at the end.  Bredon Hill could correctly be called Hill Hill Hill.