As a Turk, I do not trust people who are using Turkiye in English. That is virtue signaling which is saying they are populist, nationalist etc. etc. I also find the change idiotic at the least though I understand why they did it.
I do agriculture stuff in Turkey. This has been a useful heuristic. I estimate that 90% of the people I have faced who get angry or make a big deal about this are bureaucrats who didn't get into their position by merit.
Serious question here. As someone with closer ties to the Middle East than me, how do you look at people who pronounce Iraq correctly, as "Ih-rahk," compared to the usual American pronunciation, "Eye-rack"?
As someone who was in that country for a year all over the place with a rifle attached to my chest, Americans always ask me about my exciting vacation there. As an American convervative myself, people's heads are blown whether the are left or right leaning when I pronounce it as "Ih-rahk." At this point I find the reactions fairly comical and get a kick out of experimenting on people, much to the dismay of my wife, who thinks I should just go with "Eye-rack" to stop embarrassing her.
By the way, I pronounce Turkey as like a Thanksgiving "Turkey."
Anecdotally I was told once upon a time by a first generation immigrant from Oman that you should pronounce a countries name as they pronounce it, as a respect thing. I thought more about it, and if I heard someone say United States as "Ooonited States," I wouldn't care one bit, but there really is only one way to pronounce the United States it so it's not really a fair comparison.
Because it's a nationalistic thing to insist that all languages spell your country's name in the script and spelling of the source language. It's a stupid move by the Erdogan government to get people to stop thinking about türkiye birds when they think of the Turkey country. Other countries get by just fine.
Germany, Alemania, Deutschland.
Mexico, Messico, Méjico.
Japan, Nippon, 日本.
China, Zhōngguó, 中国.
Every country gets by getting called different things in different languages. But Turkey insisting on the spelling just because they don't want to be associated to türkiye birds, where the birds are literally named after the country, is a silly move designed to stir nationalistic pride for their near totalitarian government.
One funny thing is that in Portuguese the word for turkey (the bird) is Perú… also the same word as the South American country. Turkey is Turquia though…
I'm from a language where you'll never get it right, and most people are pragmatic and don't care about names being the way our mothers do. That's a very Western thing.
Forcing us to try to teach you our language, or half-way butcherings, are considered obnoxious. Go with the English pronunciation. Do anything half-reasonable-sounding, and it's okay too. Don't visibly struggle each time you try to say my name.
For my name specifically, there's also an uncanny valley phenomenon. My name pronounced obviously wrong by an American doesn't raise flags. Americans mispronouncing my native name sounds horribly wrong.
Not a Turk here, but I'm guessing it is equivalent to using latinx or Latin@. It is a signal that you are from a bubble that is out of touch with your intended audience. Most Latin people don't use these terms and don't particularly care for them, so it signals that you are more aligned with a third-party then with Latin people.
What? If you would try to say my country's name in my native language instead of the English version when speaking English I would think you were a nutcase.
Similarly my given name has an English pronunciation that I prefer people use when speaking English. Someone trying to pronounce it natively without being native would feel extremely awkward and not respectful at all.
I find that impossible to achieve and believe others do. I have no expectation people getting my name right because, apart from other reasons, it contains sounds that do not exist in many standard languages. It would literally require training one to be able to produce new sounds, and that is just not practical at all, not to mention outright impossible for many to do accurately. I guess it is good to try to pronounce things good enough, but "correctly" I doubt.
"Note: The official conventional long-form and short-form names remain “Republic of Turkey” and “Turkey”, respectively. “Republic of Türkiye” should be used in formal and diplomatic contexts. The conventional names may be used in place of or alongside “Türkiye” in appropriate instances, including U.S. government cartographic products, as it is more widely understood by the American public."
Of course. The will (and should) use the name the country officially defines to be the correct one. Why would they refuse and cause a diplomatic fuss over such a trivial thing?
The funny thing is that through a bunch of funny historical accidents, the bird is literally named after the country, so we could just spell the birds türkiyes too.
Turks call India "Hindi-stan".
Which in Turkish is "Turkey-the-bird-stan".
Including the Persian etymology would literally make it "Land of the Turkeys."
If Modi wanted to pick a fight with Turkey it would have made for an entertaining UN session.
Whenever I've been on the receiving end of a name change like that, I (and everyone I knew) found it obnoxious.
However, cultures differ. Turkey has a long history with name changes, and has been rather aggressive about them. When it became "Turkey," the post office wouldn't deliver mail unless the new name was used. Likewise, the capital has gone through two names since "Byzantium."
I was genuinely curious about local reaction. I have no idea, from the other end of the world, whether this was imposed by Erdogan as a crazy policy to everyone's annoyance, or whether it is wildly popular. I assume somewhere in between.
> Erdogan released a memorandum and asked the public to use Türkiye to describe the country in every language
I wonder how that works. Does Eredrogan expect every country to write and say "Türkiye? Does it work the other way around - can Germany change their official name in Turkey/Türkiye to "Deutschland"?
>Does it work the other way around - can Germany change their official name in Turkey/Türkiye to "Deutschland"?
Probably not in the same way, as Turkish is not a UN official language. They could request their name be changed in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, or Arabic though.
The problem is, the bird is supposedly named after the country, and that if the country had changed/clarified its name, so should the bird, against Turkish intent.
It's going to matter who you ask, but as a foreigner you're more likely to be talking to someone (relatively well-off, educated enough to have fluent English, probably not a fan of Erdoğan) who'd have preferred it to stay Turkey.
It's just another step in the trend of undoing Atatürk's reforms that has defined the current regime. To summarize a lot of history, the foundation of modern Turkey was a pretty massive upheaval. Atatürk (the first president of Turkey, and is viewed pretty similarly to the US's founding fathers) worked pretty damn hard to drag the country away from its Ottoman roots and towards being a Western, secular, country. Under the Ottomans, the head of church and head of state were the same person, under Atatürk, church and state were separated. Atatürk's government outright banned the wear of most religious garb in public, such as fez's and headscarves. Women were given full rights. The entire alphabet was changed from an Arabic script to a Latin one. And these are just the big ones I can pull off the top of my head.
Basically, imagine if George Washington had banned crucifixes from being displayed in public and switched the US's alphabet to Cyrillic.
It is impossible to overstate how radical these reforms were, and most were intended to bring Turkey closer to Europe both economically and culturally. The following 85 years of Turkey's history, up to the modern day, has been marked by tensions between those that generally like the reforms, and would like to see Turkey continue towards being a well-respected member of the West, and the conservative faction who want Turkey to backslide into an Islamic theocracy.
The name change is one of many postures Erdoğan has taken to distance himself from the former group, and amounts to a dog-whistle for the second.
Things like text search and exact string matching.
As minor as it might sound, if 199/200 countries work in your system, capitalism dictates that below a certain business size, the logical thing is often to just ignore the one country and move on.
I have good news for you - text search for non-ascii version of latin characters like ü is a long solved problem. That's because even in non-english speaking countries some people don't bother with diacritics, or they don't have a correct layout at that point, or the text is in source code and has to be ASCII, etc.
You can try that now - my browser highlights Türkiye when I search for Turkiye.
That's not a keyboard issue. Everyone in my country uses a standard US keyboard, we just press AlgGr to type some characters. I even learned some foreign lanugages, so I use a (standard, included by default in every linux distro) keyboard layout that allows me to type most characters used in European languages by using chords - for example, alt-shift-2 + u = ü.
So this is not a keyboard (hardware) problem, just a keyboard layout (software) problem.
It's the right-alt key. If you're using a layout that defines AltGr, the key will just work like that on a US keyboard. Even with just the US keyboard layout, the right-Alt key can still be used with numbers in Windows to type any unicode character.
Which the parent was pointing out is nonstandard. There is no alt-gr key on a standard US keyboard. You can certainly remap alt-right to alt-gr but that is nonstandard and doing so does not mean that the key exists on the physical keyboard.
For example my caps lock key is mapped to ctrl-left. That is nonstandard.
AFAIK neither Windows nor X11 have a concept of an AltGr key - it's just the right alt key so there is nothing to remap. The only difference between US and european layouts is its use as a modifier key.
