Project-1
What do they call it?
The goal is to identify the name of turkey, the main dish on Thanksgiving, in as many languages as possible to test the hypothesis that it is named after "an exotic" country. The "exotic" nature of the country is expected to vary depending on the country where the relevant language is spoken. The fact that English speakers call it turkey, a word synonymous with the name of my home country Turkey, and that in Turkish we call it hindi, the word for "related to India" is the basis for this hypothesis. I should note that I first learned that the word for turkey is peru in Hindi from our beloved Şinasi Tekin (1933-2004) at Harvard University. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has done a systematic study on the topic. Part of the posted data come from a Wikipedia site for names of wild turkey.
The following is the data I have collected so far. If you would like to contribute to this project by adding names of this animal in different languages, please click the link below to enter the word)s) and your source. I will include such contributions to the regularly revised and updated list below after finding an independent source that attests your contribution to make sure we have reliable data. The final product of this project will be an article I will write on the topic and post here. Please see the Open Research page for copyright concerns. (or click here).
I will kindly ask the contributors to send me an e-mail (aygen@post.harvard.edu) write Open Project #1 in the subject line when they make a contribution. Such e-mail notifications will allow me to follow up with their contribution, keep the words correctly matched with the contributor's name, and filter any other alterations that may be made on the document shared with the public.
Thanks in advance for your contributions.
