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The Bird With No Name
A complete guide on how not to name a new species
Perhaps you’ve heard of a country changing its name in part to remove its association, in the English language, with a meal shared in the USA with family and close friends on an important date. It makes you wonder, what came first? This time, not the chicken or the egg, but instead, the country or the Thanksgiving roasted poultry?
What came first: The country or the Thanksgiving roasted poultry?
This is a short dive into the origin of the English name for “turkey,” the bird, its link with the country formerly known as Turkey (McKernan, 2022), and the strange way this bird is referred to by names of diverse countries in different languages. By the way, in France, like in Quebec (Canada), turkey is served as Christmas Eve’s supper as well…
Why This Strange Quest?
At , we are a tight-knit team of lifelong learners wanting to share our experiences. While learning languages, we noticed that in French and Turkish, the word designating the bird called “turkey” had something in common. It’s a derivative of the word used for the country India. Dinde (d’Inde = from India) for French and Hindi (related to India), in Turkish (Bakırcı, 2013). I got curious…
