Birdoj: Papago, Arao, Tukano kaj Aliaj

What does “meleagro” mean in Esperanto?

Many European languages name the turkey after wherever it seemed to come from — “turkey” in English, dinde (“from India”) in French, hindi (“Indian”) in Turkish. Esperanto sidesteps that confusion with meleagro, borrowed from the bird’s scientific genus name, Meleagris. Alongside this clip’s more familiar birds — aglo (eagle), strigo (owl), hirundo (swallow) — it’s the one whose name comes from mythology rather than geography.

Meleagris actually started out meaning “guineafowl”: in Greek myth, the grieving sisters of the hero Meleager were turned into guineafowl by Artemis. In 1758, Linnaeus reused that same Latin name for the unrelated New World turkey when cataloguing it — a mix-up that stuck in scientific Latin, and that Esperanto inherited along with it.