In English, turkey is called turkey , such as Turkey .
But the turkey comes from North America .
This is due to a chaotic mix of geography and zoology .
The geographic and zoological background hidden in this animal are often little known.
Everything was born in Constantinople five hundred years ago:the Turks they were the undisputed protagonists of the wild poultry trade mostly caught in Guinea and in Africa Central . And they sold all over Europe .
Europeans began to call the poultry in question “ turkey chicken ”- turkish chicken - or simply“ turkey ". In addition, the Turks imported guinea fowl from Ethiopia , also called " turkey hen ”- Turkish hen - or just“ turkey ".
With the opening of trade with the New World, Europeans began to import real turkeys to Europe.
But at that point, however, there were really too many foreign birds crowding the European market .
The turkeys of North America they were soon confused with the "Turkish chickens" and with the "Turkish hens" and the English, great lovers of their meat, began to make a bit of a bundle of all the grass.
At one point they were pretty much all "turkey".
But the best part of this story is to note that Turkey he does not call the turkey “ turkey ".
Also because it wouldn't make sense. The Turks "knew that the bird was not theirs", explained etymology expert Mark Forsyth . “So they made a completely different mistake and called it Hindi , because they thought the bird was probably Indian ".
Yet the Turks are not the only ones to refer to the turkey with an Indian moniker. Even the French, the Spaniards and the Dutch draw directly from India to refer to the bird, but for a reason that is probably less intricate. At the time of the discovery of America, there was in fact the erroneous belief that the Americas were the Indies . The turkey was simply “ a bird of the Indies ”, And so it has remained in several European etymologies.