Name of Turkey


For the bird, see Turkey.
The English name :wikt:Turkey|Turkey, now applied to the modern Republic of Turkey, is historically derived from the Medieval Latin Turchia, Turquia. It is first recorded in Middle English, attested in Chaucer, ca. 1369. The Ottoman Empire was commonly referred to as Turkey or the Turkish Empire among its contemporaries.

Etymology

The English name of Turkey means "land of the Turks". Middle English usage of Turkye is attested to in an early work by Chaucer called The Book of the Duchess. The phrase land of Torke is used in the 15th-century Digby Mysteries. Later usages can be found in the Dunbar poems, the 16th century Manipulus Vocabulorum and Francis Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum. The modern spelling "Turkey" dates back to at least 1719.
The Turkish name Türkiye was adopted in 1923 under the influence of European usage.

Official name

Turkey adopted its official name, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, known in English as the Republic of Turkey, upon the declaration of the republic on October 29 1923.

Turkic sources

The first recorded use of the term "Türk" or "Türük" as an autonym is contained in the Old Turkic inscriptions of the Göktürks of Central Asia. The Turkic self-designation Türk is attested to reference to the Göktürks in the 6th century AD. A letter by Ishbara Qaghan to Emperor Wen of Sui in 585 described him as "the Great Turk Khan."

Chinese sources

An early form of the same name may be reflected in the form of "tie-le" or "tu-jue", name given by the Chinese to the people living south of the Altay Mountains of Central Asia as early as 177 BC. The Chinese Book of Zhou presents an etymology of the name Turk as derived from "helmet", explaining that this name comes from the shape of a mountain where they worked in the Altai Mountains.

Greek and Latin sources

refers to the "Turcae" in the forests north of the Sea of Azov, and Pliny the Elder lists the "Tyrcae" among the people of the same area. The Greek name, Tourkia was used by the Byzantine emperor and scholar Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in his book De Administrando Imperio, though in his use, "Turks" always referred to Magyars. Similarly, the medieval Khazar Empire, a Turkic state on the northern shores of the Black and Caspian seas, was referred to as Tourkia in Byzantine sources. However, the Byzantines later began using this name to define the Seljuk-controlled parts of Anatolia in the centuries that followed the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. The medieval Greek and Latin terms did not designate the same geographic area now known as Turkey. Instead, they were mostly synonymous with Tartary, a term including Khazaria and the other khaganates of the Central Asian steppe, until the appearance of the Seljuks and the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the 14th century, reflecting the progress of the Turkic expansion. However, the term Tartary itself was a misnomer which was constantly used by the Europeans to refer the realms of Turkic and Mongolic peoples until the 20th century.

Persian sources

By contrast, the Persian derivation Turkestan remains mostly applied to Central Asia. The name is derived from the ethnic self-designation Türk, as Turkestan is a Persian or Persianate term meaning "abode of the Turks".

Arabic sources

The Arabic cognate Turkiyya` in the form ad-Dawlat at-Turkiyya was historically used as an official name for the medieval Mamluk Sultanate which covered Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Hejaz and Cyrenaica.

In other languages

The Icelandic word Tyrkland, and the Hungarian word Törökország, i.e. "Turk-land", use native forms of derivation. In Sanskrit language turask means Turkey. It is also used largely in Bengali language.