talking turkey: the story of how the unofficial bird of the united states got named after a middle eastern country
by giancarlo casale
how did the turkey get its name? this seemingly harmless question popped into my head one morning as i realized that the holidays were once again upon us. after all, i thought, there’s nothing more american than a turkey. their meat saved the pilgrims from starvation during their first winter in new england. out of gratitude, if you can call it that, we eat them for thanksgiving dinner, and again at christmas, and gobble them up in sandwiches all year long. every fourth grader can tell you that benjamin franklin was particularly fond of the wild turkey, and even campaigned to make it, and not the bald eagle, the national symbol. so how did such a creature end up taking its name from a medium sized country in the middle east? was it just a coincidence? i wondered.
the next day i mentioned my musings to my landlord, whose wife is from brazil. "that’s funny,” he said, “in portuguese the word for turkey is ‘peru.’ same bird, different country.” hmm.
with my curiosity piqued, i decided to go straight to the source. that very afternoon i found myself a turk and asked him how to say turkey in turkish. “turkey?” he said. “well, we call turkeys ‘hindi,’ which means, you know, from india.” india? this was getting weird.
i spent the next few days finding out the word for turkey in as many languages as i could think of, and the more i found out, the weirder things got. in arabic, for instance, the word for turkey is “ethiopian bird,” while in greek it is “gallapoula” or “french girl.” the persians, meanwhile, call them “buchalamun” which means, appropriately enough, “chameleon.”
in italian, on the other hand, the word for turkey is “tacchino” which, my italian relatives assured me, means nothing but the bird. (another source mentiones “galle d'india” for turkey in italian - ) “but,” they added, “it reminds us of something else. in italy we call corn, which as everybody knows comes from america, ‘grano turco,’ or ‘turkish grain.’” so here we were back to turkey again! and as if things weren’t already confusing enough, a further consultation with my turkish informant revealed that the turks call corn “misir” which is also their word for egypt!
by this point, things were clearly getting out of hand. but i persevered nonetheless, and just as i was about to give up hope, a pattern finally seemed to emerge from this bewildering labyrinth. in french, it turns out, the word for turkey is “dinde,” meaning “from india,” just like in turkish. the words in both german (indianische henn) and russian (индюк=indyuk)
had similar meanings, so i was clearly on to something. the key, i reasoned, was to find out what turkeys are called in india, so i called up my high school friend’s wife, who is from an old bengali family, and popped her the question.
“oh,” she said, “we don’t have turkeys in india. they come from america. everybody knows that.”
“yes,” i insisted, “but what do you call them?”
“well, we don’t have them!” she said. she wasn’t being very helpful. still, i persisted:
“look, you must have a word for them. say you were watching an american movie translated from english and the actors were all talking about turkeys. what would they say?"
“well...i suppose in that case they would just say the american word, ‘turkey.’ like i said, we don’t have them.”
so there i was, at a dead end. i began to realize only too late that i had unwittingly stumbled upon a problem whose solution lay far beyond the capacity of my own limited resources. obviously i needed serious professional assistance. so the next morning i scheduled an appointment with prof. şinasi tekin of harvard university, a world-renowned philologist and expert on turkic languages. if anyone could help me, i figured it would be professor tekin.
as i walked into his office on the following tuesday, i knew i would not be disappointed. prof. tekin had a wizened, grandfatherly face, a white, bushy, knowledgeable beard, and was surrounded by stack upon stack of just the sort of hefty, authoritative books which were sure to contain a solution to my vexing turkish mystery. i introduced myself, sat down, and eagerly awaited a dose of prof. tekin’s erudition.
“you see,” he said, “in the turkish countryside there is a kind of bird, which is called a çulluk. it looks like a turkey but it is much smaller, and its meat is very delicious. long before the discovery of america, english merchants had already discovered the delicious çulluk, and began exporting it back to england, where it became very popular, and was known as a ‘turkey bird’ or simply a ‘turkey.’ then, when the english came to america, they mistook the birds here for çulluks, and so they began calling them ‘turkey” also. but other peoples weren’t so easily fooled. they knew that these new birds came from america, and so they called them things like ‘india birds,’ ‘peruvian birds,’ or ‘ethiopian birds.’ you see, ‘india,’ ‘peru’ and ‘ethiopia’ were all common names for the new world in the early centuries, both because people had a hazier understanding of geography, and because it took a while for the name ‘america’ to catch on.
“anyway, since that time americans have begun exporting their birds everywhere, and even in turkey people have started eating them, and haveforgotten all about their delicious çulluk. this is a shame, because çulluk meat is really much, much tastier.”
prof. tekin seemed genuinely sad as he explained all this to me. i did my best to comfort him, and tried to express my regret at hearing of the unfairly cruel fate of the delicious çulluk. deep down, however, i was ecstatic. i finally had a solution to this holiday problem, and knew i would be able once again to enjoy the main course of my traditional thanksgiving dinner without reservation.
now if i could just figure out why they call those little teeny dogs chihuahuas....
Another article:
TALKING TURKEY
Names for a much-travelled bird
About 1530, a new dish began to be put on English tables, a fowl a little larger than the traditional goose, but with a lot more meat and a refreshingly new taste. This bird had been brought to England by merchants trading out of that area of the eastern Mediterranean called the Levant but whom the English called “Turkey merchants” because that whole area was then part of the Turkish empire. The new bird was therefore called a “Turkey bird”, or “Turkey cock”. Within a few years it had become a favourite and familiar domestic fowl, to the extent that, sixty years later, Shakespeare knew his groundlings would understand the reference to the turkey’s aggression display of blowing out its breast and strutting when he described the posturings of Malvolio in Twelfth Night:
SIR TOBY BELCH: Here’s an overwheening rogue!
FABIAN: O, peace! Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him; how he jets under his advanced plumes! The interesting thing about the mistake over the turkey’s origins is that the English were the only people to believe they came from Turkey; nearly everyone else, including the Turks, thought they originated in India, or at least in the place they then thought was India. Turkeys actually came from Mexico and were first brought back from there about 1520, at a time when that area was called The Spanish Indies or the New Indies, illustrating the confusion in people’s minds about the true location of this new land that Columbus had found. As a result, a lot of European languages, as well as others like Arabic and Hebrew, called it something like the “bird of India”.
But in a few languages, including Danish, Dutch, German, Finnish and Norwegian, the bird was named instead as coming from Calicut (German Calecutishe Hahn, Dutch kalkoense hahn, Danish kalkun), which is a seaport on the Malabar coast of India, the same place after which calico is named. As the turkey didn’t reach India for about a hundred years after its European introduction and naming, this looks mysteriously specific. But there may be an explanation. The turkey was introduced into Europe only about twenty years after the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama had pioneered the route round the Cape of Good Hope, up the east coast of Africa and across to India, where he landed in 1498—at Calicut. It could be that people made the connection “bird of India” = “bird of Calicut” because they had heard about the Portuguese explorations and mistakenly thought the bird had been brought back from there, instead of the New Indies.
To compound the difficulties the English had with this immigrant, at about the same time, the 1530s, Portuguese merchants reintroduced the guinea-fowl from West Africa, which had last been seen in England at the time of the Romans. As it was the same Levant merchants who brought this into the country, the guinea fowl was also known for a time as the “Turkey bird”, though this confusion didn’t last long. For example, the heraldic arms granted to William Strickland in 1550 featured “a turkey-bird in his pride proper” and the bird shown is quite definitely a proper turkey. The only surviving instance of this confusion between the turkey and the guinea-fowl—but it’s a big one—was caused by Linnaeus; when he invented the new generic name for the turkey and its relatives he called it meleagris, which had been the name in classical Rome for ... the guinea-fowl.
As an aside to this, and to illustrate the total confusion over its origins by everyone, when the turkey did arrive in India, it was brought there via the Spanish possessions in the East Indies, and one name for it was the “Peru bird”, most probably because that was what the Portuguese, with their strong colonial presence in India, called it; still quite wrong, because there were no turkeys in Peru, but at least they had the right area of the world.
And the domestic turkey was re-introduced into North America from Britain, taken there circuitously by the colonists of New England and Virginia, who were surprised to find it living there wild. Benjamin Franklin once suggested its wild cousin should become the national bird of the United States. If of any country, it should be Mexico of course, but because of its wide travels and the total confusion over its origins, perhaps instead the turkey ought to be the official bird of the world.
What found in Google:
七面鳥 - Japanese
칠면조 - Korean
火雞 - Chinese
(ש"ע) תרנגול-הודו; כישלון - Hebrew
törökország, pulyka - Hungarian
kalkun - Norwegian
kalkun - Danish
kalkkuna - Finnish
kalkon - Swedish
kalkoen - Dutch
kalkoen - African
kalakunê - Northern Soto
lekalakune - Northern Soto
bata mzinga - Swahili
мисирка (misirka) - Macedonian (Pay attention how close it is to the word misir which means corn and Egypt in Turkish at the same time - )
ćurka (pura, tuka) - Bosnian
Ćurka
Turkey
ćuretina
Turkey
Tuka
Turkey
Purka
Turkey
Ćuran
Serbian
puran (pura) - Croatian
indyk - Polish
indyuk – Turkmen (apparently from Russian - )
hind xoruzu – Azeri (means indian rooster - )
індик, індичка (indyk, indychka) – Ukrainian
күрке тауық қораз – Kazakh (kürke tavik – tavuk means chicken in Turkish - )
kürke - Uigur
krůta – Czech
morka, moriak – Slovak
meleagro – Esperanto
pavo - Spanish
Meleagris gallopavo- Latin
The names for the Wild Turkey, the North American species, in other languages also frequently reflect its exotic origins, seen from an Old World viewpoint, and confusion about where it actually comes from. See Turkey for the etymology of the scientific name Meleagris.
In Spanish the turkey is called pavo, Latin for peafowl. In Mexican Spanish it is also known as guajolote, a name of Nahuatl origin.
In Turkish the bird is called hindi which means "from & related to India"; likewise the French d'inde ("from India").
In Maltese it is called dundjan (pronounced doonDYAHN), another, maybe not so obvious, reference to India.
In Hebrew the turkey is called tarnegol hodu (תרנגול הודו), which literally means "Indian chicken" Coincidentally, the Hebrew word for India (hodu) is a homonym for "thanks," contributing to a popular misconception that the word's etymology connotes "Thanksgiving chicken."
In Russian it is called indiuk (индюк), and in Yiddish indik (אינדיק), both relating to India.
In Catalan it is called gall dindi, literally meaning "Indian chicken".
The Dutch word is kalkoen derived from the city Calicut in India, likewise Danish and Norwegian kalkun, and Swedish kalkon, as well as in Papiamento kalakuna.
In Portuguese the word for turkey is peru, which also refers to the country Peru.
In Arabic it is called dīk rūmī (ديك رومي) meaning "Roman rooster" (in which "Roman" historically referred to the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire and later to the geographic areas that now comprise Turkey), or, less commonly, "Ethiopian bird."
In Colloquial Egyptian Arabic it is called the "Greek Bird".
In Greek it is gallopoula which means "French girl" or "French bird".
In Scottish Gaelic it is called cearc frangach, meaning "French chicken".
In Japan the turkey is called shichimencho (七面鳥) and in Korea chilmyeonjo, both of which translate as "seven-faced bird". This is said to reflect the ability of the bird, particularly the male, to change the form of its face depending on its mood.
In Chinese it is called huoji (火鸡) which means "fire chicken", named after the color of the head.
In Indonesian it is called Kalkun and derived from Dutch word kalkoen
In Bahasa Melayu it is called either "Ayam Piru" from the Portuguese name for the bird or "Ayam Belanda" (Dutch Chicken)
In Bulgarian it is Пуйка (puijka) but a dialect version is Мисирка (misirka), which comes from the Arabic word for Egypt
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