From dictionary.com:[After Turkey, from a confusion with the guinea fowl, once believed to have originated in Turkish territory.]
Ten seconds, and no phone calls.
Posted on 12/08/2004 5:33:57 AM PST by Turk2
Talking Turkey: The Story of How the Unofficial Bird of the United States Got Named After a 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 s "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. "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 and Russian 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. Sinasi 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 "chulluk". 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 chulluk, 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 chulluks, 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 have forgotten all about their delicious chulluk. This is a shame, because chulluk 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 chulluk.
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.
Giancarlo Casale
ping
BWAHAAAAA!!!
Old Chris Columbus was looking for a shortcut to India, so when he arrived in America, he named the natives "Indians". It is a good thing he wasn't looking for a shortcut to Turkey.
From dictionary.com:[After Turkey, from a confusion with the guinea fowl, once believed to have originated in Turkish territory.]
Ten seconds, and no phone calls.
(Scolopax Rusticola - Culluk)
Looks suspiciously like a "snipe" to me. Are you trying to send him on the infamous "snipe hunt?"
I call them "Freezer Eagles".
I LIKE your name for them!
LOL!
Named after a country? I thought they were named after a deli meat?
Turk2, thanks for posting this! It's interesting!
4-H ping, you guys!
What a courteous use of understatement!
Somehow I don't think the delicious chulluks consider their fate to be unfairly cruel. I suspect that they prefer a long life of obscurity and are hoping that this article has a short life of obscurity.
The author of this piece may have consulted with the wrong experts. I had always learned that the name of the bird has nothing to do with the country of Turkey at all.
Christopher Columbus started his trip to the New World (in search of a passage to India) on the same day in 1492 that the Jews were expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage had united most of the Iberian peninsula. There were several Jews who joined his voyage. Among them was Luis de Torres, who was hired on as an interpreter: since Columbus expected to get to India he wanted someone who could translate, and Torres spoke several languages including Hebrew and Arabic. Torres was the first European to disembark from Columbus' boats.
The story was that Torres saw these wild birds and called them "tuki", adapting the Hebrew word for pheasant which is found in the book of I Kings at 10:22.
I understand that in Spanish a turkey is called el turqueo. It would be interesting for a Spanish speaker to confirm or deny this.
By the way, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain was met by a response from one leading Old World ruler, who remarked that the Spanish were throwing out their best citizens. This ruler then sent ships to the ports of Spain, offering free transport to any Jews who wanted to move to his country. Tens of thousands did so, beginning the Sephardic Jewish migration to the Eastern Mediterranean countries. That leader was the Sultan of...Turkey, whose Ottoman fighters had captured Istanbul from the Byzantines fewer than 50 years earlier.
Very interesting and rather amusing!
I don't get it. You think we're stoopid or something? If that's the case, then tell me, where is the country of Chicken? smartypants...
I believe its official name is France.
I thought so!
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