Bizarre etymology.

This is fascinating: an account of one man's confusing quest to find out why turkeys are named after a country from which they do not come.

So how did such a creature end up taking its name from a medium sized country in the Middle East? Was it just a coincidence? I wondered.

The next day I mentioned my musings to my landlord, whose wife is from Brazil. “That’s funny,” he said, “In Portuguese the word for turkey is ‘peru.’ Same bird, different country.” Hmm.

With my curiosity piqued, I decided to go straight to the source. That very afternoon I found myself a Turk and asked him how to say turkey in Turkish. “Turkey?” he said. “Well, we call turkeys ‘hindi,’ which means, you know, from India.” India? This was getting weird.

I spent the next few days finding out the word for turkey in as many languages as I could think of, and the more I found out, the weirder things got. In Arabic, for instance, the word for turkey is “Ethiopian bird,” while in Greek it is “gallapoula” or “French girl.” The Persians, meanwhile, call them “buchalamun” which means, appropriately enough, “chameleon.”

Curiouser and curiouser.