Gnu
Origin: The Khoikhoi Name
The word *gnu* comes directly from the Khoikhoi language of southern Africa, specifically from the form *t'gnu* or *i-ngu*, used by the Khoikhoi (also called Hottentot by Dutch colonists) to name the wildebeest — *Connochaetes* — the large, bearded, horned antelope native to the African savanna. The initial click consonant in the original Khoikhoi pronunciation was systematically lost as European tongues attempted the word, leaving only the nasal-initial form that became standard in Dutch, then English.
The Khoikhoi were the pastoralist people of the Cape region when Dutch settlers arrived in 1652. Their language, part of the broader Khoisan family, made extensive use of click consonants — sounds produced by drawing air inward while clicking tongue against different parts of the palate. The colonial written record had no apparatus for these sounds. European scribes heard the word and transcribed what they could, stripping it to *gnu*.
The Colonial Pipeline: Dutch at the Cape
Dutch settlers of the VOC (Dutch East India Company) colony at the Cape of Good Hope were the primary intermediary between Khoikhoi vocabulary and European languages. When Dutch farmers — the *Boers* — expanded into the interior from the 1680s onward, they encountered the wildebeest grazing in vast herds across the Karoo and Highveld. They borrowed the Khoikhoi name wholesale. The animal entered Dutch colonial vocabulary as *gnoe* or *gnu*.
This borrowing pattern was typical of VOC-era Cape Dutch. The settlers needed names for things they had never seen: Cape Malay, Portuguese, and Khoikhoi words poured into what would eventually become Afrikaans. The gnu was simply one acquisition among many — *aardvark*, *meerkat*, *quagga*, *springbok* came through the same pipeline, all Khoikhoi or Afrikaans words that entered English via colonial naturalists and travellers.
Scientific Latin and the Naming of Species
The word reached formal European scientific discourse through the naturalist tradition of the eighteenth century. The Dutch naturalist Peter Simon Pallas described the animal in the 1760s and 1770s, and Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann placed it in his *Geographische Geschichte* (1780) as *Antilope gnu*. Linnaeus and his successors needed vernacular names from travellers and colonists; *gnu* was the name in circulation, and it stuck.
The adoption of colonial vernacular names into Linnaean taxonomy was not unusual. Scientific Latin borrowed aggressively from whatever local knowledge reached Europe. The word *gnu* thus achieved an odd kind of immortality: stripped of its click, stripped of its speakers' own phonological system, it became the permanent Latin binomial anchor for an entire genus. The genus name *Connochaetes* is Greek, but *gnu* remained the common name in all European languages, a Khoikhoi word fossilised inside the Western scientific tradition.
Blue and Black
Pronunciation: A Word That Trips
English inherited the spelling *gnu* and promptly made it irregular. The *g* is silent in English: the word is pronounced simply *noo*, rhyming with *new*. This is a curiosity of English orthography — the *gn-* cluster, also present in *gnarl*, *gnaw*, *gnome*, *gnat*, reflects an older Germanic or Latinate convention where the *g* was once sounded or marked a digraph. When *gnu* entered English in the late eighteenth century, it was slotted into this existing orthographic pattern even though the word had nothing to do with Germanic *gn-* words. The result is a word that visually suggests a *g* that no English speaker actually pronounces.
Other European languages handled it differently. German says *Gnu* with both consonants audible, following stricter phonetic spelling conventions. French similarly tends toward *g-nu*. The silent-*g* English form is a local anomaly.
The GNU Software Project: A Modern Detour
In 1983, the programmer and activist Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project — a recursive acronym standing for *GNU's Not Unix*. The name was chosen partly for its recursiveness (a hacker's joke) and partly because *gnu* was a short, pronounceable word without trademark conflicts. Stallman knew the silent-*g* pronunciation made *GNU* and *new* homophones, and the pun — GNU as a *new* Unix — was intentional.
A Khoikhoi animal name, filtered through Dutch colonialism, stripped of its click consonant, absorbed into English natural history, and then repurposed as a recursive acronym for free software. The gnu has had a stranger journey than most animals.
What the Borrowing Reveals
The path of *gnu* from Khoikhoi to English is a miniature history of colonial knowledge transfer. European settlers needed vocabulary for a world they had not encountered before. They took words from the people already there, wrote them down imperfectly, passed them to naturalists, who passed them to taxonomists, who fixed them permanently in Latin. The original speakers' phonological system — the click that made the word — was simply discarded as unwritable.
The gnu still migrates across the Serengeti in herds of over a million. The word that names it in English made a quieter migration, from the Cape Colony to Amsterdam to London to every natural history textbook in Europe, arriving changed but still recognisably itself.