תַּרְנְגוֹל

The word "תַּרְנְגוֹל" (tarnegol) comes to us from an ancient and surprising source - the Sumerian language. The Sumerians, who created one of the world's first civilizations in Mesopotamia around 5500 BCE, disappeared as a people in the first half of the third millennium BCE when they were conquered by the Akkadians, but their language had a significant influence on the languages of the region. When the Sumerians first encountered the rooster, they saw it as an improved version of a type of bird from the pheasant family that they knew and called "dar," so they called the new bird "king pheasant" or in their language "dar-lugal." The word "lugal" in Sumerian means "king" and is composed of the Sumerian word "lu" ("man") and the word "gal" ("great"), meaning "great man." The word dar-lugal passed into Akkadian in the form "tarlugallu," and from there, apparently through Aramaic mediation, entered Hebrew as "tarnegol." This is one of the rare cases where a Sumerian word found its way into modern Hebrew.