Solved: Turkeys are from India because Guinea fowl are from Ethiopia
The French word for “turkey hen” is dinde. This alone is not that interesting, I know, but give me a minute.
I remember learning in a French class once that dinde is a respelling of d’inde, or d’Inde, more precisely. D’Inde is a contraction of de + Inde, literally “From India”. So the French word for turkey is literally “from India”. That’s weird. Turkeys have nothing to do with India. Aren’t they a New World bird? Otherwise, wouldn’t the story of the First Thanksgiving be a total lie?! (It is, but not because of turkeys.)
So how did a bird that comes from the Americas be named after India? I had wondered this for years but it hadn’t bothered me enough to go looking for an answer. Fortunately, the answer found its way to me without any effort on my part (I love when that happens!). It arrived via Dan Jurafsky, a computational linguist and the author of this wonderful book. Jurafsky dedicates an entire chapter to turkey and how it came to be named after one country in English and another country in French (not to mention several others in languages around the world), even though it comes from neither Turkey nor India.
It all has to do with the fact that we have trouble keeping our birds straight. The Portuguese brought New World turkeys back to Europe, but around the same time, guinea fowl were being imported from Africa, primarily Ethiopia. Many of the traders importing these exotic birds were Turkish, and the birds became known as “hens of turkey” and similar descriptors. Guinea fowl bear a passing resemblance to turkeys, and before long these two different birds were conflated in the language.
So that answers the Turkey question, but what about India? Well, it turns out that in the 16th century, “India” could refer either to the area known today as India, or to Ethiopia. Oh, right, of course. This isn’t surprising considering the indigenous nations of the New World were also dubbed “Indians”. It seems like whenever Europeans bumped into a land mass they just assumed it was India. Keeps things simple, I guess, like calling every guy you meet “Kevin”.
