Some people in the government renamed the english spelling of my city into an unreadable alphabet soup. Not only they strongly insist the whole world to spell it this way, they also deem everyone who doesn't like it a traitor.
I'm not sure how this is related to this case? Isn't there still a cyrillic spelling of your city? Did they change that one as well? I wouldn't be surprised if they changed the English spelling to match the cyrillic one. Is it the same?
Ah I see. I think that's fine given the current conditions. However at some point, long after this war, it'd be nice to see Ukraine endorse a policy of multilingualism, as many other European countries seem to manage just fine.
> Wikipedia is a better source for common usage than the US state department, and they've explicitly resisted changing the spelling.
Why would common usage matter for something that recently changed? Of course the former name is more commonly used. The State Department is the better source since they’re the ones dictating how the US government as a whole interacts with Türkiye.
It doesn’t matter what the people in the US call countries if we’re not the ones making deals and talking to their leaders. I can convince everyone that Russia would be call Assuria but that doesn’t make it’s name. The only ones that have authority of the name of a country is the country itself.
More recently yes, but historically it was from the British Empire. US's influence has helped expand it to many countries that never had former extensive use of English creating many new second language speakers, but in terms of first language speakers, the British Empire is still the cause of almost all of them.
Umlaut modifies how a letter is pronounced; diaeresis tells you where a new syllable starts. I'm not sure how to pronounce "u" or "ü" in Turkish.
The problem with naive is that it's not very clear how to pronounce it: it's "na-ive", which isn't very clear. With naïve there's a clear indication that the "i" starts a new syllable.
While I agree that diaeresis in English are more archaic than not, I don't agree it's better style to leave them out. Right now there is, in my opinion, no good way to spell some words: "cooperation" is ambiguous (coo-peration, coop-eration, or co-operation?), "co-operation" looks ugly and is an abuse of the hyphen, and "coöperation" is nice but rather archaic.
A bit of effort to reduce ambiguity and match spelling and pronunciation (as far as the language allows) doesn't strike me as a bad thing.
I wonder if this is the impact of technology. When written by hand, there's not much practical difference between naive and naïve. With English typewriters and English keyboards, writing naïve is tricky so people, presumably, just didn't bother. Now, however, a lot of written text goes through spelling correction so, if the spell checker wants naïve then it may automatically change it or suggest you do.
In my completely rigorous and scientifically valid testing of this assumption: Word corrects to naïve, Chrome text box flags naïve, Edge text box is happy with both and imessage suggests naive. So bit of a mixed bag.
The façade of your rôle in the naïve crusade against Türkiye's self-determination will not last for an æternity, my friend. You'd better update your résumé!
Lol. Yes they do. There are dozens of instances of names of places being changed due to what the local population wants it to be called. Putting politics aside, disambiguating from the bird turkey is smart from a marketing and tourism sense.
Names of places do certainly change, but that does not dictate how those names are spelled/represented in other languages.
Now, you or anyone else can certainly spell it "Türkiye" instead of "Turkey", but a) you risk confusing people (which you may or may not care about), and b) typing "ü" is awkward on many (most? all?) English-layout keyboards. I suppose you could also spell it "Turkiye", which I suppose is closer to what the Turkish government wants, but is still "incorrect".
At any rate, I personally see little reason to change unless popular usage overwhelmingly changes. At least in the US, popular usage (which influences dictionaries) dictates English spelling, not governments.
I don't think this is about umlauts. Like you said, it is a name. I'm from Turkey and my name is spelled Doğuhan, but as I was immigrating to the US (before Unicode was commonly used) it became Doguhan. A lot of native English speakers struggle with it, almost no one pronounces it right, they misspell even after seeing it written in front of their faces.
I did play around with the idea of going by Doug during college, but then I decided that I wanted to retain my unique identity. It took years for some of my friends to stop calling me Doug, but they did change.
It'll be okay, people will adapt, umlauts or none. Otherwise, people will do what they'll do. Some idiots still refer to Istanbul (correct spelling İstanbul btw) as Constantinople. C'est la vie
Clearly there are limits to what is reasonable though; Vietnam is the common spelling in English, and I think it would be unreasonable to demand everyone spells it as Việt Nam. I can type most diacritics without too much effort, but no idea how to do that ệ double diacritic.
The title on HN actually gets it "wrong" by the way, as it's supposed to be Türkiye, not Turkiye.
Things can have more than one spelling or name, and the "best" one depends on context and personal preference. You can argue from Constantinople to Istanbul about this; but it all seems rather pointless. I wish people would just accept that other people have different preferences. This fits in the "color vs. colour" or "courgette vs. zucchini" category.
Whether Türkiye or Turkiye catches on and becomes the more common spelling? We'll see. I guess it will eventually, but it may take a while.
At least "Vietnam" is somewhat close to the native spelling. I live in Japan, and the English name is nothing at all like the native name (日本, romanized as "nihon"). But you don't see the Japanese government throwing a fit over this. Furthermore, the name in many other languages is the same or much like "Japan": in German, it's spelled the same, but pronounced "yapan" since there's no (English) J sound. What does the Turkish government have to say about the Japanese name for Turkey ("トルコ", romanized as "toruko")? If the Turkish government insisted they spell it "Türkiye", no one here is going to pay attention because none of those characters are part of the Japanese language, nor is that name even pronounceable using the sounds available.
It did make it confusing though. For a long time as a kid, I always wondered why I never heard native Japanese speakers say "Japan" unless they were speaking English. While I couldn't understand it, I could somewhere reasonably sometimes hear words where I've seen it's romanization, but not ever hearing "Japan" was quite baffling for a long time.
You don't have to feel so strongly about other countries pronunciation. It doesn't matter much. You can still use Turkey and people will understand what you talk about. The problem will only arise in official communications between governments. I believe you aren't part of them anyway.
It's not uncommon to have various diacritics in loanwords; e.g. über, führer, señor, façade, crème brûlée, or proper names such as Schrödinger, Gödel. All of these can be spelled without the diacritic too, but also with it.
Native English speaker have literally no idea what umlauts means. And the connection between how a word is spoken vs how it's spelled is tenuous indeed. So really there isn't any point.
This is the important part. Sure, go ahead and add whatever decorations to the characters you want. 99%+ of us will have no idea what they mean and treat them like they don't exist. Pronouncing those isn't taught to the vast majority because they are not even remotely commonly used. What use is any extra indication when nobody knows what it means?
It's not smart when they're demanding the use of a Turkish word that doesn't fit into English characters or pronunciation rules.
And why aren't they making the same demands of other languages anyway? How about Chinese? How exactly would their new name fit into Chinese, a language that doesn't use Latin characters at all? Not to mention all the other European languages that do?
Türkiye is not representable in English so it will never be used for in any article written in English that's not being written for some diplomatic purpose.
>There are dozens of instances of names of places being changed due to what the local population wants it to be called.
Sorry, no, not outside a country, when dealing with foreign languages. Every language has different names for other countries, and they're frequently quite different from each other. Countries have no way of forcing foreign languages to adopt any particular name in those languages.
> Sorry, no, not outside a country, when dealing with foreign languages.
Are you saying there's no instances where a country has "rebranded" (for want of a better term) its own name and people outside that country have gone along with it?
Don't get me started on the silliness of people inventing completely unique "pronouns" and demanding everyone use them: it completely defeats the linguistic purpose of pronouns. If you want to be referred to a certain way, we already have something for that: it's called a "name". You can name yourself whatever you want.
Anyway, back to your comment: this is a different issue. The pronoun thing is dealing with how people want themselves referred to in their own language, by people they know usually. The Turkey thing is about a government that wants its country called by a different name in a foreign language that it doesn't use.
