Post-Thanksgiving Reverie: What do Turkeys have to do with Turkey?

I've already signed off for the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, and if you haven't watched the old videos I posted (just below) please do so, but a brief Facebook exchange on Thanksgiving night reminded me of the oddity of the term by which we call the bird so associated with Thanksgiving: that most American of birds, the turkey. (Ben Franklin thought the wild turkey, not the bald eagle, should be the American emblem.) For you non-American readers, Thanksgiving is associated with turkeys, which we eat for Thanksgiving dinner. At the first thanksgiving in 1621, after the Pilgrims in Plymouth had survived a horrible year, the Wampanoag Indians and the Pilgrims spent several days celebrating a harvest feast. They ate deer and the fruits of the harvest, and "fowl." Turkeys aren't mentioned (there are only two references to the first Thanksgiving, by William Bradford and somebody else), but have become canonical. This was a symbol of colonist/Indian amity, and has been celebrated for many years, starting sometime after the Wampanoag were essentially wiped out. The President of the United States issues a Presidential pardon to the official White House turkey and its backup (the Vice Turkey?) on TV:

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Turkeys are not terribly intelligent birds (that's an understatement, and probably why "turkey" is a pejorative at times) but are very good to eat.

That begs the major question: If the turkey is an American bird, why is it named for Turkey?

Damned if I know, but Wikipedia offers this:

When Europeans first encountered turkeys on the American continent, they incorrectly identified the birds as a type of guineafowl (Numididae), also known as turkey fowl (or turkey hen and turkey cock) due to the birds' importation to Central Europe through Turkey. That name, shortened to just the name of the country, stuck as the name of the American bird.

Okay, but Guinea and Turkey are not particularly close to each other. But that's just the first step.

The Turks call it Hindi, or the Indian bird. French dinde, similarly, started out as d'Inde. So in Turkey, it's Indian. Apparently languages ranging from modern Hebrew to most Slavic languages (indyk or something similar) follow suit. But it's not an Indian bird, either.

In Arabic, or at least every Arabic country where I've talked turkey, it called dik rumi, the "Roman fowl," but "Roman" here means pertaining to the Byzantine Empire, hence Greek or Anatolian. It's not Greek or Anatolian either, though Anatolia today = Turkey. But various sources say that Palestinian and other Levantine dialects call it dik habashi, or Ethiopian bird. (Maybe better "Abyssinian bird" since the Arabic habash and the Greek Abyssinia are the same word.) I guess I never discussed turkeys in the Levant, if that's the case. And it's not Ethiopian, either.

I'm on a holiday break so I'm stopping there. Bernard Lewis, who whatever you think of his current politics is one of the last of the old-school orientalists, has suggested the bird is called by whatever term people see as meaning "exotic" or "foreign": something like "It's Greek to me."

I don't care what you call the damned bird. Pass the dressing.

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