Dominated by Greeks, Persians, and Romans in turn throughout the classical era, what is now Turkey was once the seat of the Byzantine Empire. Turkey, officially the Republic of Turkey, is a transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolian peninsula in Western Asia, with a smaller portion on the Balkan peninsula in Southeastern Europe.

At the crossroads between Europe and Asia, Turkey is a fascinating country.

The Dari language name for the bird, "fel murgh" also translates to “elephant chicken.”, Abdulla Kawer explained to us that “here in Afghanistan this name represents the size of this delicious meal.” He adds that he thinks the descriptive name “elephant chicken” is “better than a country name.”.

Interestingly, in French the bird turkey is called "dinde", literally "from India". These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects. Istanbul, which straddles Europe and Asia, is the largest city in the country, while Ankara …

Then there are the turkey truthers and linguistic revisionists. Wow, this is definitely the most complete account of the history of this name I saw! And even further afield, Malay speakers came to know the turkey as the ayam belanda, or “Dutch chicken,” in reference to the colonists who introduced the bird to the Dutch East Indies in the 17th century.

The French originally called the American bird poulet d’Inde (literally “chicken from India”), which has since been abbreviated to dinde, and similar terms exist in languages ranging from Polish to Hebrew to Catalan. Etymology. The native word is land. I'll see if I can find a source for you.

The English name of Turkey (from Medieval Latin Turchia/Turquia) means "land of the Turks".

And in Danish turkey is "kalkun", a shortened form of a name borrowed from German, "Kalekutisch hun", which means "hen from Calicut". The Turkish, for their part, call turkey “hindi,” the Turkish name for India. Huh, that explains why the French word for the turkey is "dinde" — probably "d'Inde" or "of India". Country … First record of country-and-western as a music style is by 1942, American English. Its binomial nomenclature, Meleagris gallopavo, is a hodgepodge. Calicut is a city in Southern India. The phrase land of Torke is used in the 15th-century Digby Mysteries.

The Portuguese are no less geographically misguided, as they took their name for the turkey, peru, from the South American country conquered by the Spanish around the same time that turkeys began appearing on European tables. But wait, there’s more.

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The Turks “knew the bird wasn’t theirs,” Forsyth explains, so they “made a completely different mistake and called it a hindi, because they thought the bird was probably Indian.” They weren't alone. But "turkey" the word is a geographic mess—a tribute to the vagaries of colonial trade and conquest. Quick Google search more or less confirms my memory.

"Turkki", which is "Turkey" in Finnish, also refers to the fur of an animal. By early 16c. The first name comes from a Greek myth in which the goddess Artemis turned the grieving sisters of the slain Meleager into guinea fowls. In fact, its English name is based on one big mistake.

Dan Jurafsky, another linguist, argues that Europeans imported guinea fowl from Ethiopia (which was sometimes mixed up with India) via the Mamluk Turks, and then confused the birds with North American fowl shipped across the Atlantic by the Portuguese. Kamsler’s letter, however, was met with a firm rebuttal from the president of the Association for the Study of Jewish Languages, David L Gold. Turkey adopted its official name, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, known in English as the Republic of Turkey, upon the declaration of the republic on October 29 1923. ________________________________________________________________, symbolize - v. to represent or express a particular idea or quality, translate - v. to change words from one language into another language​.

Ashley Thompson wrote this report, based on an earlier Learning English report by Anna Matteo. In my native Malay language, a turkey is called 'ayam belanda' which literally means 'Dutch Chicken' or 'chicken from the Netherlands'. Within the turkey lies the tangled history of the world. In Turkey it had been named after the place the Turks found it, India. How Did Thanksgiving 'Turkey' Get its Name?

New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast, Discussing the origins of words and phrases, in English or any other language. So if Turks call themselves as Turk, is it safe to assume that Europeans started to call them how they called temselves? There is an African bird called the guinea fowl. The French call it “dinde,” a name that also connects the bird to India. These are the core obsessions that drive our newsroom—defining topics of seismic importance to the global economy. in Turkish, the bird turkey is called Hindi. The medieval Greek and Latin terms did not designate the same geographic area now known as Turkey.

", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_(bird). “Turkey” has similar names in several other languages. Our emails are made to shine in your inbox, with something fresh every morning, afternoon, and weekend. Pomponius Mela refers to the "Turcae" in the forests north of the Sea of Azov, and Pliny the Elder lists the "Tyrcae" among the people of the same area. This foreign bird came to Europe through Turkish lands.

Country-mouse is from 1580s; the fable of the mouse cousins is as old as Aesop. A letter by Ishbara Qaghan to Emperor Wen of Sui in 585 described him as "the Great Turk Khan.

So what is the bird called in India?

In the 11th century, however, Turkish nomads from Central Asia moved into the region, gradually conquering all of Asia Minor. But this probably wasn’t the same turkey you’ll be eating this week. Instead, they were mostly synonymous with Tartary, a term including Khazaria and the other khaganates of the Central Asian steppe, until the appearance of the Seljuks and the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the 14th century, reflecting the progress of the Turkic expansion. The word Turk is of unknown origin, but it’s used in such varying languages as Italian, Arabic, Persian, and many others to refer to people from this region.

[5] The Turkic self-designation Türk is attested to reference to the Göktürks in the 6th century AD. Also from c. 1300 as "area surrounding a walled city or town; the open country." As I recall the animal was often named based on where the locals thought the animal was from, so for most Western countries, it is called turkey, in Turkey it is is the Turkish word for India.

The reference to India probably comes from the old, wrong idea that the New World was in Eastern Asia. In an October 12, 1492 letter to a friend in Spain, de Torres had referred to the American bird he encountered as a tuki, the word for “peacock” in ancient Hebrew and “parrot” in modern Hebrew (a more dubious version of this story claims that Columbus himself was a Jew who hid his identity in the aftermath of the Spanish Inquisition but drew on his lineage to christen the fowl).

News for the next era, not just the next hour. Hargraves explains what happened. The bird is named after the country in English, if memory serves.

[11] Similarly, the medieval Khazar Empire, a Turkic state on the northern shores of the Black and Caspian seas, was referred to as Tourkia (Land of the Turks) in Byzantine sources.

Idk about the etymologies at hand here but damn that country loves to be a false cognate. In fact, its English name is based on one big mistake.

“Some Europeans saw an American turkey, thought that it was the guinea fowl, which at that time was called the ‘turkey cock,’ and so gave it the same name.". How exactly the word "turkey" made its way into the English language is in dispute. The U.S. Thanksgiving holiday is symbolized by its traditional food, a large bird we call a turkey. "[6][better source needed], An early form of the same name may be reflected in the form of "tie-le" (鐵勒) or "tu-jue" (突厥), name given by the Chinese to the people living south of the Altay Mountains of Central Asia as early as 177 BC. Here’s where things get even more bewildering. Country club "recreational and social club, typically exclusive, located in or near the country" is by 1886. The word turkey first was applied to it in English 1550s because it was identified with or treated as a species of the guinea fowl, and/or because it got to the rest of Europe from Spain by way of North Africa, then under Ottoman (Turkish) rule. This country has maximum number of people (97 percent) belonging to Islam. Later usages can be found in the Dunbar poems, the 16th century Manipulus Vocabulorum ("Turkie, Tartaria") and Francis Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum (Turky).

Why are turkeys called “turkeys?” It’s a question you might find yourself pondering this week if you’re one of the 88% of Americans who will be sitting down to a plate of roast turkey this Thanksgiving. We could say it is a case of mistaken identity.

The early North Americans / Christopher Columbus had some weird thing for India, me thinks. East Thrace, the part of Turkey in Europe, is separated from Anatolia by the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. “Along with countless other pseudoscientific claims about supposed Hebrew influence on English and other languages, the myth of the Hebrew origin of ‘turkey’ was quietly exploded in volume 2 of Jewish Linguistic Studies (1990).”.

Kick off each morning with coffee and the Daily Brief (BYO coffee). Or, more precisely, from Turkish merchants in the 15th and 16th centuries. First used of the guinea fowl (Numida meleagris), native to Africa, which was imported to Europe by Turkey merchants. Hello, everyone. That made me wonder: why is that? Turkey the bird resembles the guinea fowl, which was often exported into Europe via the Ottoman Empire around the time of the "discovery" of the Americas by Europeans. The Portuguese are no less geographically misguided, as they took their name for the turkey, peru, from the South American country conquered by … It wasn’t until later in the 16th century, when more and more of the birds began to be imported into Europe from colonies in North America, that turkey became attached to what we’d now call a turkey. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. It may be hindi in Turkey, but in Hindi it’s ṭarki. [4], The Turkish name Türkiye was adopted in 1923 under the influence of European usage.[3]. Let us know in the comments section!

Germany calls nougat "Turkish honey" which is funny twice because nougat is not only not from Turkey but also contains no honey. All Rights Reserved. As just another large, edible game bird that roasted well, the American birds simply came to be known by the same name all the other birds had been known: The turkey had officially arrived in the English language, albeit from the opposite geographical direction from its namesake nation. So, what do they call this North American bird in India? So, the English thought of the bird as a “Turkish chicken.”. Slightly later, the word was also used of the larger northern American bird Meleagris gallopavo, which was brought to Spain by conquistadors in 1523.