Why is the American bird called Turkey? - History Forum ~ All Empires

Someone forwarded me this;

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. �inasi 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 �ulluk. 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 �ulluk, 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 �ulluks, 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 �ulluk. This is a
> shame, because �ulluk 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 �ulluk. 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....