The sport of shooting pheasants is very English, and few people think that the pheasant is a foreign bird, introduced into England, just as in fact the turkey, which seems to belong especially to the English Christmas, came to us from America. The pheasant gets its name from the river Phasis, in the Eastern country of Pontus. It may seem peculiar that a bird coming from America should be called a turkey; but we saw in an earlier chapter how vague the people of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were about America. When Columbus reached the shore of that continent, people thought he had sailed round by another way to the "Indies." In nearly all European countries the turkey got names which show that most people thought it came from India, or at least from some part of the "Indies." Even in England it was called for a time "cok off Inde." In Italy it was gallina d'India (or "Indian hen"). The modern French words for male and female turkeys come from this mistake. In French the bird was at first known as pouille d'Inde (or "Indian fowl"). The name came to be shortened into the one word dinde, and then, as people thought this must mean the female turkey, they made a new word for the male, dindon.
But though so many words come from the names of places, and some of these would not seem to do so at first sight, there are other words which seem to come from place-names which do not do so at all. Brazil wood is found in large quantities in Brazil, but the wood is not called after the country. On the contrary, the country is called after the wood. This kind of wood was already used in Europe in the twelfth century, and its name is found in several European languages. When the Portuguese adventurers found such large quantities in this part of South America they gave it the name of Brazil from the wood. The island of Madeira got its name in the same way, this being the word for "timber," from the Latin word materia.
Again, guinea-pigs do not come from Guinea, on the west coast of Africa, though guinea-fowls do so. Guinea-pigs really come from Brazil. The name guinea-pig was given to these little animals because, when the sailors brought them home, people thought they had come from Africa. But in the seventeenth century a common voyage for ships was to sail from English or other European ports to the west coast of Africa, where bands of poor negroes were seized or bought, and carried over the Atlantic to be sold as slaves in the American "plantations." The ships naturally did not come home empty, but often people were not very clear as to whether the articles they brought back came from Africa or America.
Again, India ink comes, not from India, but from China. Indian corn comes from America. Sedan chairs had nothing to do with Sedan in France, but probably take their name from the Latin verb sedere, "to sit."
In these words, as in many others, we can see that it is never safe to guess the derivation of words. Many of the old philologists used to do this, and then write down their guesses as facts. This caused a great deal of extra work for modern scholars, who will not, of course, accept any "derivation" for a word until they have clear proof that it is true.
CHAPTER XI.
PICTURES IN WORDS.
Everybody who has thought at all about our ways of speech must have noticed that we are all constantly saying things in a way which is not literally true. We say a child is a "sunbeam in the house;" but, of course, we only mean that she is gay and happy, and cheers every one up by her merriment. Or we describe some one as a "pearl among women," meaning that by her splendid qualities she is superior to most women as a pearl is to common stones.