Mbabaram for dog is “dog”

This article contains images of deceased persons. (About this warning.) No one knows exactly where the word “dog” comes from in English. We know in Middle English it was dogge and in Old English it was docga or dogga, but from there it’s a mystery. Other Germanic languages use some version of “hound”: like German Hund, Dutch hond or Icelandic hundur. Some languages have borrowed “dog” from English, often to mean one specific kind of dog, but other than that, the word “dog” is unique to Old English and its descendants.1 Well, almost unique. On the entire opposite side of the planet from England, in the jungles of Northeastern Australia, the Mbabaram people independently invented the word “dog” for our canine companions by sheer linguistic coincidence. A “dog” in Mbabaram – or English! (Sam Fraser-Smith, CC BY) The Mbabaram are an Aboriginal Australian people from the Atherton Tablelands, a plateau in the modern Australian state of Queensland southwest of Cairns. When the ancestors of…