The turkey..bird or country?

What do you think first when I say “turkey”? Do you think in the country or in the bird which is typically on Thanksgiving? Well, what I´m going to talk about is the connection that seems to be between the dish and the country. Which name was created first?

To begin with, it is believed that this bird was introduced to the Mediterranean in ancient times and was known to the Greeks and Romans. This bird seems to have disappeared from Europe and was reintroduced from West Africa by Portuguese traders at the end of the fifteenth century. If this bird was from Africa, why was it called "turkey" in English? Probably because it was introduced to England by the so-called "Turkey merchants" who came from the Ottoman Empire. on Thanksgiving? Well, what I´m going to talk about is the connection that seems to be between the dish and the country. Which name was created first?

It's likely the first bird called "turkey" in English wasn't the familiar Thanksgiving fowl (Meleagris gallopavo), but a smaller domesticated bird originally from sub-Saharan Africa: (Numida meleagris), which we now call the Guinea fowl.

Meleagris gallopavo was introduced to Spain from America some time between 1498 and 1526, and thence to England between 1520 and 1541. There were some different names for the turkey in Spanish, but the one that finally caught on was pavo, which originally did refer to the peacock. To differentiate it from the turkey, the peacock is now called pavo real in Spanish (which could be translated into "royal turkey").

In Portuguese, the bird is called peru, despite the fact that the bird was not introduced to Peru until after the Spanish conquest. The most reasonable explanation for the association is that the bird became popular in Portugal shortly after Pizarro conquered Peru in 1532, and the Portuguese made a natural assumption.

Let's talk about the country. Turkey was named for the Turks, which means "a citizen of the modern state of Turkey" or more broadly, "an individual of the Turkic-speaking people." The real question is the origin of the name Turk. The word is essentially the same in many languages, including English, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian (Farsi). It probably comes from some Turkish root. There are two different roots, the first means "strong" and the second "the people".

There are a couple of other theories of how the country got its name, both wrong. The first one claims that the country was named after the first leader of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. But like most Turks, Mustafa didn't have any surname at all until 1934, when he chose Atatürk ("Father of the Turks") for himself. Another theory explains that the English named the country after the bird. But the country was already called "Turki" or "Turkeye" in English by 1275, hundreds of years before the bird was known in the Old World.

English is not the only language that incorrectly associates the turkey with Turkey. Welsh borrowed the English usage and called the bird twrki. But it is interesting that many other languages incorrectly associate the bird with other countries. In many languages (including Turkish and French), the bird is called by names indicating it's from India. This may derive from the confusion between the East Indies and West Indies that was rampant in those days.

In conclusion, there is not a clear fact that helps us to develop a theory. There are many contradictions but it seems that the bird was named in that way in English because of its introduction in Great Britain by the Turkish. I hope it can help you.