Thread by @Paperclip_In

Few stories never get old. It is Thanksgiving Day today, so we thought of revisiting the mind-bending word origin of the turkey. This is a history of global geographic mess and mistaken identity.

A thread.

1/11

The origin of turkey, a bird that is now a traditional feature of American Thanksgiving dinner 🦃and Christmas supper in the United States, has long been a source of curiosity.

2/11

Fascinatingly, it is a bird named after the nation that people mistakenly believed the bird originated from, and it was quite a global phenomenon as a result of a bizarre history of trade routes, geographic mistakes, and cultural misperception. 3/11

To put everything in context - Americans 🇺🇸 call the bird Turkey because most likely they thought it came from the country Turkey 🇹🇷, through Turkish merchants in the 15th and 16th centuries after they mistook it with another bird, guinea fowl. 4/11

Now in Turkey 🇹🇷, the nation, which has no native turkeys, does not call turkey turkey. Instead, in Turkey, turkey, the bird 🦃, is called dinde - which means India or Hindi, because the Turkish people thought the bird came from India 🇮🇳.

5/11

And, so does the French 🇫🇷( coq d'Inde - chicken of India), Polish 🇵🇱 (indyk), Basque (indioliar) and the Armenians 🇦🇲 and named it likewise. 6/11🇮🇳

It is believed that the mistaken identification of the turkey as a bird from India resulted from a long-held misunderstanding that the New World and India belonged to the same region. 7/11

In Holland 🇳🇱, Croatia 🇭🇷, Finland 🇫🇮, Sweden 🇸🇪, Lithuania 🇱🇹, Denmark 🇩🇰, Norway and Estonia the bird is called kalkon or kalakutas, because the people from Scandinavia, Nordic and Baltic Europe thought the bird was imported from the ancient Indian port town, Calicut.

8/11

The Confusion spread across various regions across the world. In Malaysia 🇲🇾, they call it Dutch Chicken. And, in Greece they call it galopoula, the French Chicken.

9/11

And that is not all, some other bizarre naming includes - In Arabic, it is called Rumi, as in Roman. 🇮🇹

In Portugal 🇵🇹 and Brazil 🇧🇷, they call it Peru 🇵🇪. In parts of India, the bird is also called Peru, influenced by the Portuguese traders. 10/11

And none of them are probably right as the bird is native to North America, domesticated by the Aztecs.

What name does this bird have in your local language? 11/11

Sources:
Source: Joe Smith, Tracing the Wild Origins of the Domestic Turkey, Blog by Nature,

Zach Goldhammer, Why Americans Call Turkey ‘Turkey, The Atlantic, blog.nature.org/science/2017/1…
theatlantic.com/international/…

Image attributes:
California Department of Fish and Wildlife, CC BY 2.0 from
@WikiCommons

John James Audubon, The Birds of America, Public domain from
@WikiCommons