bir ara milletin coşup kampanyalar başlattığı "artık turkey yazmayacağız, türkiye diyeceğiz, bizimle hindi diye dalga geçiyorlar, ühü ühü" zırlamasının başına gelenleri merak etmektir.
"Turks call their country Türkiye. This name is hundreds of years old and applied to this part of the world even when it was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. It's difficult for English-speaking people to pronounce for two reasons. First, there's no ü in the English alphabet. The closest sound we have is the ew in few, which is not followed by an r as the ü in Türkiye is. The other reason this name is hard for us to say is that the last two syllables contain the two "front" vowels (vowel sounds made with the tongue raised near the front of the palate) i and e (ee and eh in English) with a y in the middle. This combination is not entirely unheard of in English. For example, it exists it the pronunciation of the last two syllables of the ordinal numbers 20th, 30th, 40th, etc. However, it is otherwise rare and I am hard-pressed to find another word that has this sequence of sounds. At any rate, "Turkey" is the mispronunciation of Türkiye by uncouth Western tongues, not -- I repeat NOT -- an eponymy from the bird's name.
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Enter the guinea fowl, a bird that greatly resembles the turkey -- that is, if you are a myopic mole and you are observing both birds in a darkened room with a burlap bag over your head. For some unknown reason, Europeans for a time identified the turkey with the guinea fowl, which was at that time being imported through -- you guessed it -- Turkey. Both birds were called "Turkey-cock" in honor of the country in whose marketplaces the latter was sold. This is how the name of a great nation came to be conferred upon a lowly, but nonetheless tasty, domesticated avian.
kaynak: emekli staff sergeant ve şimdi ingilizce öğretmenliği yapan bir insan.
