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| image via wikipedia |
Either:
A) Someone spiked my Thanksgiving punch with Wild Turkey bourbon. I live in the south now, you know.
or
B) There's a moral to this story.
(You know it's B, or maybe it's C - all of the above.) *ahem*
In Turkey (the country), turkey (the bird) is called"hindi" and I always wondered why. Hindi refers to India, meaning the Turks believe the turkey is from India. The turkey is a native north American bird.
Long story short, since I'm doing NaNoWriMo:
Europeans trading in India picked up the Tamil word "thukki" for the peacock. (I wonder where the name peacock comes from...but this is the short story.)
Then, Christopher Columbus thought he found the route to the East Indies when he landed here. Some believe he found birds which he thought were a type of thukki. (A fact he he may have used to confirm his landing in India.)
When the turkey finally came to Turkey, Turks recognized it/mistook it for a cousin of the guinea fowl and peacock, which they already called hindi.
....and Europeans were just generally confused some more by Turks selling guinea fowl.
Turkey... thukki... What's the difference?
Look fast:
If I was drinking Wild Turkey straight, I guess I might confuse the two....
Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
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Yes, I too am now confused and so will just stare at the beautiful peacock! But I love turkeys (alive!) they have such a language and change colours too depending on their mood!
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I think it would take a whole bottle of Wild Turkey to confuse the two!
ReplyDeleteSo cool! I love etymology and had no idea about this. I kind of thought it was a Houston/Houston situation (the street in New York/the city in Texas) where the two words have very different derivations from different languages and just happen to look the same in English. Man, Columbus was really bad at naming things!
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