Carorinu

Turkeys are awesome. They taste better than chicken, go really well with cranberry sauce, and make very ridiculous noises when you taunt them. However, they do not originate from Turkey. In fact, I stumbled across this website the other day: http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/7/7-174.html and discovered that the Turkish word for turkey is “Hindi,” which comes from the Turkish word for India. According to this website, the word for turkey in Arabic, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, French, Yiddish, and Dutch, derives from each respective languages’ word for India. Interestingly enough, the Malay word for turkey translates to Dutch Chicken. So thank you to Alain Theriault from the University of Montreal for providing the world of Google with some insight as to how mysterious a past this delectable bird has. Apparently, the turkey was named after a guinea fowl found in England, called the turkey cock. Perhaps our American ancestors chose to call it the turkey because “Indian” was already mis-applied elsewhere, so they chose to name it after what they deemed to be a similar country. Also likely, the turkey could have been called of India in other places because America was accidentally known as India for a while.

From what I’ve gathered, the turkey was originally found in the Americas, and then exported to East Asia, and then exported all over Europe and Western Asia. From there, the turkey traveled down through Indonesia and into Malaysia. I could be completely wrong, but why else would Malaysians call it a Dutch Chicken, when the Dutch called it Bird from India? Those Dutch did spend an awful lot of time in that part of the world back then. They weren’t always a bunch of pot smoking hippies you know. (How did such small countries, such as the Netherlands, Portugal, and England take over such large portions of the world?) If only I could Google World the path that the turkey might have once taken.

On a different note, the Japanese word for turkey is “shicimencho,” which means seven faced bird. What? How does that even make any sense?

To honor the turkey this year, Dan has drawn a few pictures. The first is his interpretation of a seven faced turkey. The other two go together-the turkey decides, as part of its battle with imperialism, to attack NYC during the Macy’s Day Parade. In the second, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln ride in on Santa’s sleigh to prevent the nation from turning into gobbledy gook. I’d imagine they were successful as the Macy’s Day Parade still happens every year. No wonder the president pardons a turkey every year.