![Origin of word for the bird Turkey in European languages [OC]](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/0xqx6d81cywe1-978x1024.png "Origin of word for the bird Turkey in European languages [OC]")
If you find this interesting you can check Translations
bird in the genus Meleagris
at https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/turkey this is the data source like anything on the internet but especially words etymology it might be wrong. But the folk etymology people here can also be wrong.
another data source https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/5vx7jl/the_crazy_origins_of_the_word_turkey_the_bird_in/
The code is here so you can change texts, fonts, colors etc yourself if you want to improve it https://gist.github.com/cavedave/fc8c73e2c09be90ddf78434345a91932
I couldn't fix the color on Croatia to blue.
Posted by cavedave
23 Comments
Next do the same for the origins of guinea pig. Might be interesting.
Why is peru both brown and light blue? Is the word from peru or is peru onomatopoetic?
Spelling nit: “Bird only native ***to*** North America.”
The word “too,” with two vowels, is an adverb that means “excessively.” For example: “I ate too much turkey” or “That turkey is too fat to fly.”
The word “to,” with one vowel, is a preposition. For example: “I flew to Türkiye to eat some Turkey.”
Calicut is not the word for turkey in danish? Am i missing something?
In Arabic it’s ‘Roman’ (read: ‘European’) chicken. You might also add that for North Africa, unless they have their own term.
Then what is the bird generally called in Indian languages? Home?
Yeah, that’s not true. In Greece we call them “γαλοπούλα”, which translates to “French”
I think I will cook a swanky bird this autumn.
I’m always confused by the random word-stress signs that sometimes pop up in these maps for one of BCS versions, but never for any other language. Accent marks are not normally written in BCS, anymore than they are in English.
It isa pretty swanky bird
I think most of this map is wrong by doing 5 s research
In Macedonian, the word is Misir, which is the Ottoman Turkish word for Egypt. The etymology of the term is unknown to like 99.999% of the population.
According to your source, Arabic also has it coming from Rome/Europe in general (and India) apparently, at least in some dialects.
Why hasn’t the spelling been adjusted for anything? This very clearly isn’t how these languages spell the word
This is total bullshit! There is not even single bird that have “bird” in its name in bulgarian. Not to mention that the bulgarian word for bird cames several centuries before the english language itself…
I’m sorry but when the name refers to India doesn’t it refer to America and not India the country?
Why is peacock is Spanish?
In Chinese the word is 火鸡, which directly translates to fire chicken.
Sea child… I like that better. Can we go back to using that word?
Can’t we all just agree on Turkiye!
Huh? So the French *and* Russian/Easter European word for a turkey is “Indian”?
Truthahn is spelled with a capital T. There is no word “truthahn” in German. Capitalisation matters in spelling, and it matters more in German than it does in many other languages.
For slovak it is more like sailor