15 Sep /16

Gorilla

Gorilla – Word of the day - EVS Translations
Gorilla – Word of the day – EVS Translations

Three months after a gorilla was shot dead in the Cincinnati Zoo, when a boy fell into its moat by accident, the story is still a hot topic, bringing a huge public dispute and controversy.

With numerous petitions and attempts which try to immortalise the gorilla, from memes, through suggestions to create a memorable Pokemon, to seeking real justice; Harambe is really stealing the show from King Kong.

And while we do not have an opinion on the Harambe’s case, we are in a position to follow the origin of the word gorilla, itself.

The word originated from a Greek translation of the voyage undertaken by the Carthaginian explorer Hanno in the west African coast, circa 500 B.C, where it was used to name the plural of some wild, hairy female beings: “In its inmost recess was an island …… inhabited by a rude description of people. The females were much more numerous than the males, and had rough skins: our interpreters called them Gorillae.”

And while it is not really clear whether what Hanno encountered were true gorillas, another species of apes or actual humans – most researches suppose that those were chimpanzees – the word was born as Γόριλλαι (gorillai) and a meaning of a ‘tribe of hairy female beings.’

The English translation of Hanno’s travel account came out in circa 1800 and naturally marked the first use of the word gorilla in English print.

The word was later adopted by the American physician Thomas Staughton Savage, a missionary in Western Africa, and the naturalist Jeffries Wyman when they studied the skull and bones of a  gorilla specimen. The result of their study, A description of the external characters and habits of Troglodytes Gorilla, was published in 1847, in the Journal of the Boston Natural History Society. Where troglodyte derives from Greek  ‘cave-dweller, cave-man’ and refers to tribes identified as living in various places by ancient writers.

The first modern European to observe living gorillas, is believed to be the French-American traveller Paul Du Chaillu, during his travels in West Africa from 1856 to 1859. His work titled Explorations and adventures in Equatorial Africa, along with his gorilla speciments (some he sold directly to the Natural History Museum in London) reached Europe at the time of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to capture the public imagination and fuel the debate about the place of humans in nature.

And while some records mention a travelling show in England which possibly displayed a living gorilla in the 1860s, the first official record for a gorilla that was brought alive to Europe comes from 1876 when a German expedition captured a male one for the Berlin Zoo. Mpungu was two years old and, after being lended to London and Hamburg Zoos, died on the next year.

One of the most famous and also most admired by us, as language experts, gorilla is the female Koko (born in 1971 and still alive), who is known for having learned more than 1,000 hand signs from a modified version of American Sign Language.