Mexstan

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. "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. S¸inasi 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 have
forgotten 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....

DPG

Stan, great post! I love this kind of stuff. I really learned something that I have never wanted to know, but having found out about it, find it fascinating. No, really!

Pretty coooool!

DeWain