What’s the word for turkey in Turkish?

According to this entry on the Turkish Wikipedia, the word for turkey in Turkish is hindi.



Wait, so what’s the Hindi word for turkey?

We can follow the cross-lingual Wikipedia sidebar link again to find out that the word for turkey in Hindi is टर्की. If you don’t know Devanagari, that’s transcribed ṭarkī in the Latin alphabet. Which…looks an awful lot like “turkey” again.

What the heck happened here?

The entry for turkey on the English Wikipedia has some clues:

When Europeans first encountered turkeys in America, they incorrectly identified the birds as a type of guineafowl (Numididae). Guinea-fowl were also known as turkey fowl (or turkey hen and turkey cock) because they were imported to Central Europe through Turkey. The name turkey fowl, shortened to just the name of the country, stuck as the name of the North American bird.

Etymonline confirms this, and also explains the Turkish name:

1540s, “guinea fowl” (Numida meleagris), imported from Madagascar via Turkey, by Near East traders known as turkey merchants. The larger North American bird (Meleagris gallopavo) was domesticated by the Aztecs, introduced to Spain by conquistadors (1523) and thence to wider Europe, by way of North Africa (then under Ottoman rule) and Turkey (Indian corn was originally turkey corn or turkey wheat in English for the same reason). The word turkey was first applied to it in English 1550s because it was identified with or treated as a species of the guinea fowl.



The Turkish name for it is hindi, literally “Indian,” probably influenced by Middle French dinde (c.1600, contracted from poulet d'inde, literally “chicken from India,” Modern French dindon), based on the then-common misconception that the New World was eastern Asia.

In fact, the turkey has been named after quite a wide variety of places in different languages, including Calicut, France, Peru, and Rome/Byzantium. For languages spoken where turkeys are found natively, however, it tends to be known as some variant of “big bird”.

For more details, check out this other Wikipedia link: List of Names for the Wild Turkey in different languages.