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

[Terry Decker]

Fascinating article, but it's got some problems.

The term turkey was apparently used for Guinea fowl before the North 
American turkey arrived in Europe and transferred to the larger bird when it 
arrived.  The assumption has been that the Guinea fowl were being sold as 
exotic meats from the sophisticated and wealthy Ottoman empire.  I suspect 
that the Turkish use of "Ethiopean fowl" for Turkey is based on better 
knowledge of where Guinea fowl derive, which suggests they may have returned 
to Europe via Turkey.  The Romans ate Guinea fowl which they had imported 
from Africa and called the Numidian hens.

To my knowledge, there were no turkeys served at that first Thanksgiving and 
it was maize supplied by the natives that kept the Pilgrims from starving.

The "hindi" or "Indische" came about because of confusion over the East and 
West Indies.  Foodstuffs which originated in the (West) Indies often became 
labelled as being from India (check out capsicum peppers in Leonard Fuchs 
herbal as a fine example).

I'd also be careful with the translation of "gallapoula."  The scientific 
name for the turkey is Meleagris gallopavo.  Meleagris is the Greek word for 
the Guinea fowl and gallopavo essentially means "cock peacock."   I don't 
have the resources at hand, but this comes across as problematic and 
deserving of a closer study of the etymology.

Maize is called "Gran Turco" or "Turkisch Korn" (Fuchs) because the Ottomans 
planted it heavily and apparently Europeans were primarily introduced to it 
from Turkey.

The "chulluk" is, according to one source, a woodcock, which would probably 
not have been introduced to Europe from Turkey.  I'd place my bets of the 
Guinea fowl.

Bear



> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
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