How a New World bird came to be named after countries halfway around the globe. 这种新世界的鸟类为什么会以半个地球外的国家的名字来命名。 Within the turkey lies the tangled history of the world. 在土耳其境内有着错综复杂的世界历史。
OK, not quite. But not far off, either. 好吧,或许并非如此,但也相差无几了。 Turkey the bird is native to North America. But turkey the word is a geographic mess—a tribute to the vagaries of colonial trade and conquest. As you might have suspected, the English term for the avian creature likely comes from Turkey the country. Or, more precisely, from Turkish merchants in the 15th and 16th centuries. 火鸡这种鸟是原产于北美洲。但是turkey一词来源是一种地理上的大杂烩 — — 是对殖民地贸易和征服的异想天开的献礼。你可能认为这种鸟类的英文名字可能来自于土耳其这个国家的名字。或者,更确切地说,从第十五和十六世纪的土耳其商人那里得名。 How exactly the word turkey made its way into the English language is in dispute. The linguist Mario Pei theorized that more than five centuries ago, Turks from the commercial hub of Constantinople (which the Ottomans conquered in the mid-15th century) sold wild fowl from Guinea in West Africa to European markets, leading the English to refer to the bird as turkey cock or turkey coq (coq being French for rooster”), and eventually turkey for short. When British settlers arrived in Massachusetts, they applied the same terms to the wild fowl they spotted in the New World, even though the birds were a different species than their African counterparts. The etymology expert Mark Forsyth, meanwhile, claims that Turkish traders brought guinea fowl to England from Madagascar, off the coast of southeast Africa, and that Spanish conquistadors then introduced American fowl to Europe, where they were conflated with the turkeys from Madagascar. Dan Jurafsky, another linguist, argues that Europeans imported guinea fowl from Ethiopia (which was sometimes mixed up with India) via the Mamluk Turks, and then confused the birds with North American fowl shipped across the Atlantic by the Portuguese. “土耳其”这个单词如何出现在英语语言中依然有争议。语言学家Mario 裴理推测大概在五个多世纪前,君士坦丁堡这个商业中心的土耳其人 (在15 世纪中叶被土耳其人征服)将来自西非几内亚的野禽(即珍珠鸡)卖到欧洲市场 ,所以那时的英国人称这种鸟为土耳其公鸡,并最终以土耳其来简称这种动物。当英国移民抵达(美国)马萨诸塞州时,在这块新大陆上他们用同一个词来称呼他们在这片土地上看到的野禽,尽管这里的野禽不同于非洲的那种。词源学专家马克福赛思说土耳其商人把几内亚的这种野禽从马达加斯加带到英国,而西班牙征服者把美洲的野禽引到欧洲,所以就和来自马达加斯加的“土耳其”混合在一起了。丹 Jurafsky,另一个语言学家,认为欧洲人通过马穆鲁克土耳其人从埃塞俄比亚 (有时候人们将埃塞俄比亚同印度混在一起了) 进口几内亚野禽,然后与葡萄牙通过大西洋从北美进口的野禽混淆在一起了。
【为什么美国人称火鸡为"土耳其"】相关文章:
★ 美国人的家
★ 美国人的婚姻方式
最新
2016-11-11
2016-11-02
2016-11-01
2016-11-01
2016-11-01
2016-10-28