The Makatau people living in the area called the place Takau. It was translated in Holo (Taigi) as Tánn-káu (打狗). That was a decent phonetic translation. When the Japanese came, they thought the Kanji meaning is terrible. So they retranslated it to Taka-o (高雄), which is a existing location name in Japan. The Japanese did this to several Taiwanese place names. When the KMT came, they simply couldn’t careless what the locals actually called the place, and just read the Japanese Kanji in Mandarin.
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