Sunday 23 December 2012

All The Trimmings

In 1981, my late father (born in 1922) spent his first Christmas in Britain since 1967. He was aghast that it had become "traditional" to eat turkey on Christmas Day, and maintained to his dying day, in 1991, that the practice had been unheard of in the country that he had left.

Everyone has always known that turkey came from the New World, yet for some reason we call it "turkey", the French call it "dinde" (i.e., d'Inde, from India), the words in other Romance languages are presumably similar, and I am told that the Turks themselves call it "hindi". I have just been told elsewhere that the Turks got their word from the French. Rather illustrating my point. Can anyone explain?

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