Time for a light post as America celebrates Thanksgiving weekend. On the menu, a roasted Meleagris gallopavo domesticus, a fowl native to Mexico and southern USA. But why, oh why, is this bird called “turkey” in English, “peru” in Portuguese, and “of india” in many other languages (“dinde” in French, “indyushka” in Russian, and “hindi” in – hold your hats – Turkish)? How geographically confused can we be? Do names of plants and animals reflect histories of migration and movement, or mistaken identities, or accidental out-of-context snapshots?
As far as I can ascertain, two wild turkey species exist in the Americas, and the turkey found in farms around the world came from a variety domesticated in central Mexico by native peoples and brought to Europe by the Spaniards. The Portuguese name “peru” for turkey thus evokes Peru, the jewel of Spanish colonies in the Americas, a general stand-in for things from America (just like in English, “pine” sometimes stands in for fir, spruce, casuarina, or other similar trees).
The names “turkey” in English and “dinde” in French (and other European tongues) reflect higher levels of confusion and conflation of places and species, and a variety of explanatory theories intermingle here: (1) the observation that things coming into western Europe from the Orient had diverse ‘eastern’ adjectives attached to them (like turkey fowl, coq d’inde), and it is of course possible that turkey-raising spread eastwards in the Mediterranean before heading north; (2) the name Indies of course doesn’t just point east – Columbus thought he was in the east Indies – hence the bird could be named after the (west) Indies; and (3), finally the likelihood of confusion between turkeys and guinea fowl (Numida meleagris), another largish domestic fowl (native to Africa – from Guinea to Abissinya, judging from its diverse common names – and also domesticated since a long time), which also arrived into into Europe from the ‘Orient’ (north Africa, the Magreb, falling into that category), carrying the name Turkey coq among others. These are great stories, but hard to pin down definitively.
As Sonia Shah notes in her book The Next Great Migration, botanists and zoologists liked to name plants and animals for places, and before evidence emerged of ceaseless plant, animal, insect, and human migrations, these names corresponded to peoples’ ideas about the fixity of origins. To them, everything had its “place”. And these names hide their migration histories.
But not only do creatures and plants travel, change places, and make new homes for themselves, but also their names travel. My colleagues and I saw this when we were working with linguists to link the movements of boab (Adansonia gregorii) in northwest Australia. The movements of loanwords between Aboriginal tongues mirrored genetic traces of movements in the baobabs (Rangan et al. 2015). In another study, we tried to use plant names to devine possible links between the plants and their spread and use by escaped slaves on Reunion Island – the observation was that many plants carry the adjective “marron”, for marooned or gone-wild captives, like Reglisse marronne. All the same, we issued a strong warning for taking the geographical adjectives at face value: “What we can see is that epithets that purportedly refer to places, status or social groups can give hints of a plant’s past, but that they can be inconsistently applied and might reflect a variety of sometimes-confused origins and additional layers of meaning (‘fresh’, ‘feral’, ‘pungent’) … Similarly, Anna Tsing has shown how the name ‘Africanized’ honeybee, which was applied to an invasive newcomer in the United States, contains multiple layers of gendered and racist connotations.” (Kull et al. 2015, p. 60).
So, after all, the Turkey – Peru – bird from the Indies (or India) is a good example of how cautious one needs to be with taking the meaning of names for granted. To conclude, I would just like to highlight my favourite common name for the turkey. It is “vorontsiloza“, from the Malagasy language. This means bird-not-dangerous, or, don’t be scared of this big, loud, fowl! Perhaps that’s in response to the Mexican name “guajolote“, which comes from the Aztec (Nahuatl) “huexolotl“, which means big monstrous bird. Happy. Thanksgiving!
Bibliography:
- Krulwich, R. (2008) Why a turkey is called a turkey. NPR podcast (webarchive)
- Kull, CA, E Alpers & J Tassin (2015) Marooned plants: vernacular naming practices in the Mascarene Islands. Environment and History 21 (1):43-75 (official link).
- Rangan, H, KL Bell, DA Baum, R Fowler, P McConvell, T Saunders, S Spronck, CA Kull & DJ Murphy (2015) New genetic and linguistic analyses show ancient human influence on baobab evolution and distribution in Australia. PLoS ONE 10 (4):e0119758 (official site). dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0119758.
- Wikipedia (in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese…)
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Christian Kull 