THE AMATEUR WORD NERD: One country’s turkey is another country’s… snot-hen

By Barbara McAllister

Word of the Day: Turkey

It’s interesting that this humble native North American bird that has become a symbol of American Thanksgiving is named after a country in southwestern Asia. Its name came from a case of mistaken identity coupled with 16th century’s vague knowledge of geography that makes “turkey” the Where’s Waldo of the poultry world.
The misidentified bird originally was a guinea fowl native to Africa and similar in appearance to the North American turkey. The guinea fowl was a wild species named for its origins on West Africa’s Guinea Coast. Traders passed through Turkey to bring this foreign bird to Europe, so the English thought of the bird as a Turkish chicken and called it a turkey cock. When Europeans came to North America, they mistook the similar looking native North American fowl as the same bird and so called it a turkey cock as well.
Other parts of the world named the bird for its New World origins, except that the New World was incorrectly assumed to be part of Eastern Asia. This was thanks to Columbus, who was not aware of the scope of his discovery and called natives of the new land Indians. Others followed suit. The Turkish called the North American bird the Turkish name for India (hindi) based on this incorrect assumption.
The French also called it the French equivalent of “chicken from India” (poulet d’Iinde) and many countries defaulted to India as the far-away unknown region early explorers thought the Americas were. The Polish, Basque and Armenian words for our turkey are their word for India or Indian chicken in their respective languages. Dutch, Swedes, Finns Lithuanians, Norwegian and Danes all call it a variation of Calcutta in their language. Portugal went with Peru, preferring South America as its origin and Luxembourg didn’t play the origin guessing game at all. They went with a name based on the turkey’s distinctive appearance of the fleshy bit that hangs off its beak. The turkey probably wouldn’t be as popular a dish at Thanksgiving if it went by the Luxembourgian name of schnuddelhong, or “snot-hen.”