Happy Thought for 28 November 2025

Have a Happy Thought:

Happy Thanksgiving, to everyone who celebrates this uniquely US-American holiday!

One of the central foods in many Thanksgiving meals is Turkey meat.

A roast turkey prepared for a traditional U.S. Thanksgiving meal. The white plastic object in the breast is a pop-up thermometer. Credit: Patrick Fitzgerald from Atlanta, GA, USA - Flickr.com - image description page

 

Many children, (and to be honest many adults), are confused as to why this bird, which is native to the Americas, shares/shared a name with a country in south-east Europe / western Asia.

Well, strap in, this is a story.

So, there are these large birds that live in the Americas and were domesticated by about 2,000 years ago.

After Europeans stumbled across the “New World”, some of these explorers realised that the domesticated bird was a great food stock, and decided to bring it back to the “Old World”.

To Europeans, these birds looked similar to what we now call guineafowl.

Image: A Helmeted guineafowl at Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. Credit: Bob - Picasa Web Albums

        Side-note: guinea fowl were first domesticated in western Africa, around the present-day country of Guinea, so this name actually makes sense.

 

Since guineafowl were first brought into Europe by way of the country Turkey… Europeans had called guineafowl “Turkey cock” or “Turkey hen” (for male and female birds, respectively).

Apparently the very much larger bird that we now call Turkey looked similar enough, the name transferred over to them as well.

Image: Adult male wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo intermedia) strutting at Deer Island Open Space Preserve near Novato, Marin County, California. Credit: © Frank Schulenburg

 

 

<sigh>

Oh, and that is just for the English-speaking world.

Languages all over the world have different names for this bird, pretty much all relating to how their culture first encountered them.

Just have a look at this map for the names for this one animal across Europe:

Image: https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Turkey-1024x721.png

 

In short: People from the modern country of Türkiye encountered guinea fowl via India, and this is reflected in their word, as well as many others (see: Russian, Polish, etc). The Nordic countries got even more specific because some Nordic explorer must have first encountered such a bird in Calcutta.

 

Meanwhile, Portugal, and through them Croatia, seem to be the only ones that recognize where this bird actually originated (well, at least some of these birds): Peru.

 

All to say, this is all a very good reason that Wikipedia has a disambiguation page for the word “turkey”.

 

Happy not-a-guinea-fowl-no-its-not-from-India-either-no-its-not-french-really-Luxembourg-“snot hen”??? Day!

 

PS The people who actually did the work of domesticating this bird called it something like huehxōlō-tl, or tōtolin.

 

Thanks to this very fun short video for bringing this to us!

https://youtube.com/shorts/smtury0cT-c