Happy Meleagris gallopavo Day

Or, how the "thanksgiving bird" acquired its name:

 The homeland of the fowl known as "Meleagris gallopavo"  or "Americana sylvestris avis," is the North American continent. The 1494 Tordesillas declaration, concieved by the Pope in Rome, divided the world into a Spanish and a Portuguese sphere of influence, using a degree of longitude that passed through the eastern  part of South America, hence Portuguese Brazil and Spanish everything else (Florida, Louisiana, Mexico, Peru, ...) Asia went to the Portuguese. The Portuguese brought this fowl to their Goa colony in India.  Circa 1615, Jahāngīr (a direct descendent of the founder of the "Mughāl" empire in India, Bābur 1483-1530, who was himself a grandson of Timūr who died in 1405) wrote his Tüzük-i Jahāngīrī (Institutes of Jahangir c. 1615). In his book, Jahāngīr also described this fowl in detail replete with a color drawing.  Since "Meleagris gallopavo" resembled the "Numida meleagris" commonly found in Africa (especially in Guinea), and already known in India, the former became known in British India as the "Guinea Fowl."  [See O.Caroe, "Why Turkey." Asian Affairs (October 1970)]. Meleagris gallopavo was then introduced to Egypt. Egypt was ruled by the Mamlukes who were Qypchaq turks (later Circassians, but they kept up Qypchaq Turkic for a while). the official name of the state was called اَلدَّوْلَةُ ٱلتُّرْكِيَّةُ ad-dawlat~ut-turkiyya(t) "the Turkish state" in Arabic and Europeans during this period sometimes called Egypt "Turkey" (Turcia, Turchia). After 1517, Egypt became a province of the Ottoman empire. Either because of the Mamluks or the Ottomans, Egypt was considered "Turkey" as Egypt remained "Turkey" in a different sense, referring to the Ottoman Turks. When traders took a breeding stock from Ottoman ("Turkish") Egypt, or alternatively Mamluk Egypt, to Spain and the British Isles, the bird was designated "turkey." As a result, the pilgrims landing on Plymouth rock in 1620 were familiar with "Turkey," when they encountered it in their new home.  After the 1776 Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin suggested that "turkey"  --native of the land-- be designated as the symbol of the young American republic. Instead, Haliaeetus leucocephalus ("Bald Eagle") was given this honor.
 The name of the bird entered the Turkish language as Hindi ("Indian (Bird)" or, "from India"). Some other languages:

French: coq d'Inde, dinde, dindon.
German (Old, according to Hobson-Jobson): Kalikutische Hahn (the Calicut - not Calcutta - fowl).
Calicut is south of Goa on the Malabar coast. Standard German is Truthahn (onomatopoeic).
Dutch: Kalkoen. As with German.
Danish: Kalkun. Similar to German.
Italian: Pollo d'India (fowl of India), more commonly tacchino (onomatopoeic).
Turkish: Hindi.
Russian: индейка ; indejka
Portuguese: peru
Hindi: peru (पीरू) from Portuguese.

 In Bulgarian, the name of the bird is Пуйка (pujka) but a dialect version is Мисирка  (misirka), which is found in the Greek dialect of Northern Greece as well. which comes from the Turkish word for Egypt, Mısır (which is straightforwardly from the Arabic for Egypt مِصْرُ Miṣr, Colloquial Maṣr).
Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) in his Historia vitae et mortis has: Gallus Indicus, aut Turcicus (quem vocant), iracundus ales et carnibus valde albis (The Indian or, as some would have it, Turkey cock, a bird of strong passions and with extremely white flesh). Portuguese seems to have chosen for the bird what was originally Native American personal name, Birú or Perú and applied by the Spanish for what is now the country Peru.

Jahangir writes in his Tüzük-i Jahāngīrī (Translation by A. Rogers, London, 1909 as appears in Asian Affairs, 1: 3, (1970), 305 — 312):

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 On the 16th Farwardin, Muqarrab Khan, who is one of my chief retainers and old confidants of the Jahangiri service, who had attained the rank of 3,000 personal and 2,000 horse, came from the fort of Cambay and had the honour of waiting on me. I had ordered him, on account of certain business, to go to the port of Goa and buy for the private use of the government certain rareties procurable there. According to orders he went with diligence to Goa, and remaining there for some time, took at the price the Franks asked for them the rareties {sic}  he met with at that port, without looking at the face of the money at all (i.e. regardless of cost). When he returned from the aforesaid port to the Court, he produced before me one by one the things and rareties {sic} he had brought. Among these were some animals that were very strange and wonderful, such as I had never seen, and up to this time no one had known their names. Although King Babar {Bābur Shah} has described in his memoirs the appearance and shapes of several animals, he had never ordered the painters to make pictures of them. As these animals appeared to me to be very strange, I both described them and ordered that the painters should draw them in the Jahangirnama, so that the amazement that arose from hearing of them might be increased. One of these animals in body is larger than a peahen and smaller than a peacock. When it is in heat and displays itself, it spreads out its feathers like the peacock and dances about. Its beak and legs are like those of a cock.
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16 Farwardin is usually 5 April Gregorian

That the English called the bird a turkey at a very early date is clear from a reference to the bird by Cranmer himself in his Dietarie as early as 1541 (Leland's Collectanea, 2nd edition, Volume VI, cited in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed.). Cranmer says: "The turkey-cocke is one of the greater fowles of which an ecclesiastic was to have only one in a dish." The author was thinking of the true turkey and not a guinea fowl since it is mentioned along with other large birds such as the swan and crane.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica cites a 1627 authority, Minshew's Guide into the Tongues, "A Turkic or Ginnie Henne - ex Guinea, regione Indica unde fuerunt ad alias regimes transportati" (from Guinea, a region of India, whence they were transported to other regions). Here there is a serious geographical confusion as well as an ornithological confusion of the two birds.

Turkey as referred to the guinea fowl was taken to be named after where it was sold to Europe in this early source given by the Oxford English Dictionary:

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1655   T. Moffett & C. Bennet Healths Improvem. x. 84   They were first brought from Numidia into Turky and thence to Europe, whereupon they were called Turkies.

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The earliest reference to "turkey" (bird) in English is given by the OED as 1555:

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1555   in W. Dugdale Origines Juridiciales (1666) xlviii. 135   Turkies 2. rated at 4s. a piece..00. 08. 00.

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The bird appears in Shakspeare:

1598   Shakespeare Henry IV, Pt. 1 ii. i. 26   The Turkies in my Panier are quite starued.

Turkeys were discovered by Europeans in domesticated form in Mexico in 1518.
To the English mind of the sixteenth century, Indian, Arab (Moor, Saracen) and Turk meant much the same. Indeed Jahangir was an Indian, a Muslim and Turkic. Both the guinea fowl and the American turkey were exported to Europe through Ottoman lands. Onomatopoeia, mimicking its call, may also have been a factor in favoring "turkey".

Moving to its scientific name, Olaf Caroe writes in 'Why Turkey?', Asian Affairs, 1: 3, (1970), 305 — 312:

 ... Linnaeus applied to the turkey the generic name Meleagris, by which the guinea-fowl had been known to the Greeks and Romans from the days of Greek myth. He added the specific name of Gallopavo, i.e. cock-peacock, taking it from C. Gesner's Gallopava, and he puts it like this: Gallopavo quod de utriusque natura videtur participare (because it appears to partake of the nature of both.) He means it has red flesh on its head like the comb of a cock, and a fantail like a peacock. The Encyclopaedia remarks that, by misapplying to the turkey the ancient name given to the guinea-fowl, Linnaeus was undoubtedly partly responsible for the confusion between the two birds. The article goes on to say: "It is almost unquestionable that the name of turkey was originally applied to the bird which we know as the guinea-fowl, and there is no doubt that some authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries curiously confounded the two species."

Recent genetic studies have shown the turkey to be in the family Phasianidae (which includes chickens), subfamily Meleagridinae, within the genus Meleagris (Linnaeus, 1758; the only genus in the subfamily), species gallopavo (the other species in the genus being the oscillated turkey of the Yucatán) gallopavo. Previously the turkeys had a family of their own Meleagrididae. The family Phasianidae also now includes the guinea fowl in the subfamily Numidinae.

From Olaf Caroe. Jahāngīr's drawing of a turkey:



Finally the indigenous words for "turkey" in N America, NB The turkey is not native in the wild west of the Rocky Mountains.

Based mainly on a translation (anonymous; Turkish Radio Hour) of:
      H. B. Paksoy, "Türk Tarihi, Toplumların Mayası,
            Uygarlık"  Annals of Japan Association for Middle
            East Studies (Tokyo) No. 7, 1992. Pp. 173-220. 
            Footnote 26.
      [Reprinted in Yeni Forum (Ankara), Vol. 13, No. 277,
            Haziran 1992. Pp. 54-65].

Expanded and corrected by Yusuf Gürsey to the present form.

see also:
(Asian Affairs is the Routledge publication.)
Caroe, Olaf(1970) 'Why Turkey?', Asian Affairs, 1: 3, 305 — 312
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03068377008729546
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03068377008729546

also found in:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03068377008729546