[Discussion] Türkiye-Turkey-Hindi...

[gonul@pultar.org]

Journal of American Studies of Turkey
6 (1997) : 89.

Note to the Editor

from  Hasan B. Paksoy *
paksoy@babbage.franklin.edu

Happy Meleagris Gallopavo Day


Most Americans tend to think that the Turkish Republic is named after a bird. As
one result, quite a few Turks in the US, at one time or other, had to answer the
question "What do you Turks eat during Thanksgiving�" This query is
especially heard during November of each year, as Americans prepare to observe
the quintessentially American holiday.

The homeland of the fowl known as _Meleagris gallopavo_ or _americana sybestris
auis_, is the North American continent. The 1494 Tordesillas treaty, forged by
the Pope in Rome, granted the monopoly of commerce originating from the newly
discovered continent to the Portuguese (as opposed to the Spanish). The
Portuguese brought this fowl to their Goa colony in India. Circa 1615, Cihangir
(a direct descendent of the founder of the "Mughal" empire in India, Babür
[1483-1530] himself a grandson of Timur [d. 1405] wrote his Tüzük-ü Jahangiri
(Institutes of Cihangir). In his book, Cihangir also described this fowl in
detail replete with a color drawing.  Since _Meleagris gallopavo_ resembled the
_Meleagris Numida_ commonly found in Africa (especially in Guinea), and already
known in India, the former became known in British India as the "Guinea Fowl"
(see O. Caroe, "Why Turkey." _Asian Affairs_. October 1970). _Meleagris
gallopavo_ was then introduced to Egypt, a province of the Ottoman empire and
entered the Turkish language as _hindi_ ("from India"). When traders took a
breeding stock from Ottoman ("Turkish") Egypt to Spain and the British Isles,
the bird was designated "Turkey." As a result, the pilgrims landing on Plymouth
Rock in 1620 were familiar with "Turkey" when they encountered it in their new
home. After the 1776 Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin suggested
that "turkey "native of the land" be designated as the symbol of the young
American republic. Instead, _Haliaeetus Leucocephalus_ ("Bald Eagle") was given
this honor.

* Dr. Hasan B. Paksoy is a member of the Intercultural Studies Department at
Franklin University.


Note: Dr. Hasan B. Paksoy is now at Texas Tech University



Quoting Onur İnal <oinal@ku.edu.tr>:

> 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. Şinasi
> 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....
>
>
>
>