To be honest, it is a mere matter of coincidence that brings these two words into an awkward relationship between the Turkish and English languages. At once a country proud and strong and yet also a large bird, proud and edible….
Resisting the temptation of an overabundance of awful jokes thus far, I’ll cave in just this once and proffer a quick linguistic insight:
Turkey in Turkish is Turkiye (TURK KEY YEAH). Part of the Turkic language family which originated in Central Asia thousands of years ago and now stretches from the Mediterranean Coast and Eastern Europe northeastwards to Siberia and Western China.
This is why Turkey and Turkmenistan, although on opposite sides of the Caspian Sea, share the same root in their namesake.
It has nothing to do with the migratory habits of that tasty little bird given guest of honor status at almost all American homes this weekend.
The Mediterranean to Siberia. A quick glance of the map would show that this is a huge swath of land. A quick and honest reflection will show just how startlingly little we as Americans truly know of this land, people and culture.
At present there are roughly 200 million native speakers of a Turkic Language. Turkish Proper, as it is called, is by far the most widely spoken, accounting for close to 40% of all Turkic speakers.
Believe it or not, within the Turkic language family there are an astounding 30 different languages. Once again, America’s attempt at high school foreign language studies seems woefully limited (Romance language any one?). Some of the Turkic languages include: Azeri (Azerbaijan), Kazakh (Kazakhstan), Uzbek (Uzbekistan), Turkmen (Turkmenistan) and Uyghur (China).
The major characteristic features of the Turkic languages are vowel harmony, extensive agglutination by means of suffixes and Subject – Object – Verb word order.
What this means is that these languages are hard. Damn hard and require an entirely different manner of thinking in order to get the words out of your mouth and your point across.
Subject –Object – Verb word order is in a sense “backwards” to the Subject – Verb – Object order that we English speakers are accustomed to.
I go to the store. Becomes in Turkish I the store to go.
Ben bakkala gitiyorum.
You can imagine how anything more substantial can become, complicated, confusing and frustrating rather quickly.
Agglutination means you just keep adding suffixes onto root words to create sentences. Thus, sentences can be single words where those words can be 18-23- 30 letters long. Yowser-
Here’s a baby one: Bekleyebilecegim. I will be able to wait.
With the use of suffixes there are no prepositions in Turkish.
So much for Sister Anna’s Fifth Grade grammar class.
As one young Turkish friend of mine flippantly told me, as a wry smile cracked across his face and his eyes lit up, “Don’t worry Leo, learning Turkish is easy- all our words are short.”
Right, root words of 3 to 4 letters a piece that can morph into anaconda size behemoths within the blink of an eye.
Now back to that bird, before it gets cold.
Turkey, the bird, in Turkish is Hindi.
A nice five-letter word having nothing to do with Hinduism or the Hindi language of Northern India.
We’ll leave it at that.
Happy Thanksgiving. Sukran Gunu as it would be said in Turkish.
