Port News

Talking Turkey

November 19, 2007

Why does the bird we call turkey have so many different names around the world? One possible answer is that the dewlapped fowl got caught in the middle when the Old World ran into the New. After all, the Europeans were trying to find a western route to India, not a new continent. And for a while they could not quite believe their own discovery. For years, the New World was known as the Spanish Indies, vestigial in the term, West Indies.

 Almost all the newcomers to this fresh world – from Cortez to the Puritans – saw these birds we now call turkeys. By all accounts, the turkey is a native of Mexico. Bernal Diaz, the author of The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, reports that the Aztecs sold turkey in a chocolate mole sauce in the markets.

 Now the Spaniards had little trouble transforming the Nahuatl word tomatl to tomate (tomato), but could not make the indigenous word for turkey, uexolotl into a word they liked. In Spain, a turkey is stilled called pavo after the Latin word for peacock. In Mexico, they call the bird guajolote. In other European countries, the uexolotl fared worse, much worse.

 There were gung-ho, sea-going merchants in the country of Turkey who called regularly at the port of Cadiz, where they would barter for – among other things – a gobble or so of the uexolotls and head for England. The English called these salesfolk Turkey merchants, and, for want of an imaginative alternative, merely dubbed the fowl, turkiebirds.

 Frenchmen could not admit to themselves that the turkey came from the New World and called the bird poule or coq d’Inde, which has become dindon. That old gourmand, M. Brillat-Savarin, proclaimed himself a dindonophile. He wrote, “The dindon is certainly one of the handsomest gifts the New World made to the Old World… It is the largest and, if not the most subtle, at least the most tasty of our domestic birds.”

 The Germans called the turkey, Kalekutische Hahn, as if the bird had come from Calcutta. When some enterprising merchant finally brought a few specimens to sell to the Indians of India, those who bought called the bird a peru, which is at least a lot closer to the bird’s native land.

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