What Happened to the 'Turkey'?

We all know the turkey, which looks like a large hen. This bird has some interesting names in different languages and countries.

In English it is called 'turkey' — Turkey, the country. How on earth did this bird get the name of a country? What is more interesting is that in Turkish we call this bird 'hindi', which means 'from India'.

In Turkish we have many words that came from French. In French this bird is called 'dinde', and the male 'dindon'. Dinde is the French way of saying 'from India'. Turkish made a pure translation from the French, and so it was called 'hindi'.

Out of curiosity, people in India were asked: how do you call this bird in your language? And they answered: we do not have this bird in India, and for that reason its name does not exist in our vocabulary! This bird came from America, and as we do not have it in India we did not invent any name to identify it. Those who asked and made this linguistic investigation insisted: if you watch an American film you have subtitles under the film — what do you have to write to say turkey? They thought and decided to take the American name and call it by the American word 'turkey'.

This same word for turkey in Portuguese is 'peru', like the name of the country, because in Portugal this bird is known to have arrived from Peru. The Arabs call this same bird 'the bird of Ethiopia' (Habeşistan), and the Greeks call it 'gallopoula', or 'French hen'. The same bird in Italian is called 'tacchino', a word with no relation to any bird. The same Italians call maize 'grano turco', 'Turkish grain'. This time we are back in Turkey, and in Turkish we call maize 'mısır' (Mısır = Egypt).

The professor of philology Şinasi Tekin of Harvard University explains that in Turkey we have a bird called 'çulluk'. The çulluk looks like a turkey but is smaller in size. Before the discovery of America, the English took this bird, the 'çulluk', to England and called it 'Turkey bird', the 'bird of Turkey', or simply turkey. When the English went to America they confused the American turkey with the 'bird of Turkey', and that is how this bird came to be called 'turkey' in English. As we saw, in other nations this bird is called 'bird of India', 'bird of Peru' or 'bird of Ethiopia'.

The turkey in Turkey is generally eaten on the last night of the year, and the smoked meat of the turkey is also famous. On the last night of the year it is the custom to eat this bird, specially prepared with great care, stuffed with chestnuts and cooked in the oven slowly, to have a special flavour and make the meat very tender.

Speaking of eating (komer): in other Latin languages this word is 'manger', 'mangiare'. The root of these words is 'manducare', which means 'to bring the food to the mouth with the hand'. In certain parts of the world this custom is still the normal way of eating. Even so, things that can be eaten are called in English or French 'comestible', a word that comes from komer.

Etymology is a very interesting science that takes you down a thousand roads, and in the end you often arrive at a common root: humanity.