[Sca-cooks] How the turkey got its name ...

[Christiane]

Fowarded from the SCA-MideastCulture group, originated elsewhere, but this is a group of people who will really appreciate it ...

Question is, are there still chulluks? 

 Subject: Re: [METU_NA] Digest Number 604
 
 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 turkeys "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