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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

How does ISO country names actually work? It's clearly using the English name for countries; Norway is listed as Norway, not as Norge. Does that mean Türkiye is now the English name for the country? Or is it now the only country with its own language's name rather than the English name in the registry?

Basically, what's going on here?

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This is part of the ISO-3166 standard (free draft here[1], official pdf is payware[2]). AFAIK the ISO standards are only available in English and French, so you'll only get the English and French names.

The United Nations has a list of official country names in six languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish) [3]. Beyond that, if you want official country names in their native languages or X country in Y language, you'll have to compile them yourself.

[1] https://cdn.standards.iteh.ai/samples/72482/cbb6318e772a4f22...

[2] https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html (links to the pdf near the bottom)

[3] https://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/ungegn/docs/11th-uncsgn-... and https://unterm.un.org/

> Basically, what's going on here?

Inflation is ~75%. The Sultan wants distractions.

Right. Still much better than another one of the autocrats starting a war to distract from losing support amongst the "voters".

Well he didn't start a war but certainly didn't stay far from it in Syria.

Yep.

Official value is 78.62% [1]

Unofficial rate is 175.55% [2]

[1] https://www.tcmb.gov.tr/wps/wcm/connect/TR/TCMB+TR/Main+Menu...

[2] https://enagrup.org/

Follow-up question: what if other countries follow suit, especially ones that don't use a Latin-based alphabet? Egypt is formally called "جمهورية مصر العربية" in its native language - should that be recorded as the ISO Full name for EG?

I think Egypt should be forced to revert to hieroglyphs.

Actually the name "Egypt" comes from the Greek pronunciation of the ancient Egyptian capital Memphis ( at least for most of the time it was).

The current official name is "Junhuriyah Misr al-Arabiyah" which is Arab Republic of Egypt in English. This is not something special. a lot of countries have something like "republic of" in their names.

> a lot of countries have something like "republic of" in their names.

Well, that depends. The name for China the administrative region is 中华人民共和国, but I wouldn't really want to call that the name of the country. That's 中国, and if a regime change occurred, the name of the country would still be 中国, even if the name of the government were no longer 中华人民共和国.

Yeah, numerous Communist regimes have/had either "People's" or "Democratic" (or in the case of North Korea, both) in their names. Normally when the Communist regime fell, this was removed,but the main part of the name preserved.

It's not strictly a Soviet thing. When Ukraine declared its independence from Russia back in 1917, it was as "Ukrainian People's Republic", but it was definitely not communist or even particularly socialist. Ditto "Belarusian People's Republic". As I understand, in both cases the intent was to convey that it is a nation-state of the people that inhabit it, and not a part of a large empire anymore.

We'd need to touch up our school curriculum (well, even more than we already do).

Türkiye is the new official English-language name for the country

The umlaut says it's not English.

It's the name that the country uses in its official communications in English, and expresses the desire to see the same name in English communications addressed to it.

They’re essentially throwing an identity tantrum on a global scale, while tip-toeing towards nationalism internally.

This would be a laughable matter, were it not a sign of what’s coming.

In a world where we are asked to refer to people by their chosen names and pronouns rather than what they were asigned in the past, why should we not refer to a country by its chosen name? Especially if it's going through the proper channels to promulgate its name change?

Ignoring the political implications of the question for a second, if nothing else when people ask to be referred to by a different name, their chosen name is usually at least reproducible on the keyboards in common use. Most people in the US would have absolutely no idea how to type Ü, let alone İ. In addition, English speakers don't have [y], [c], or word-final [e] in their phoneme inventory.

Yeah, I fully expect people without easy access to u with umlaut to just write u (regardless of case), and those without easy access to capital dotted i, to just write a dotless capital I. And the pronunciation will be brutal, at least for the first few decades, but change is a process.

So being forced to call anyone by what they prefer is cool and encouraged, except when it comes to a country?

Practically, yes, but Turkey is a sovereign country and it can ask the UN to call it in English whatever it likes. And indeed - they have requested that their official English-language name be now Türkiye. One of the stated reasons is that Turkey is homophonic with 'turkey' (the thanksgiving meal), which further has a connotation of 'lousy'. This is 100% real, their current leadership is a bit strange: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61671913

Of course in reality people will keep on calling them Turkey in practical every day English. But the UN has a policy of honoring such requests by the country itself - probably to avoid meddling in politics.

>Practically, yes, but Turkey is a sovereign country and it can ask the UN to call it in English whatever it likes.

Can China ask for it to be called 中国?

I presume that might be rejected on the grounds that it is a completely different writing system. But my point is that even if it was accepted, the true common name of China in practical English would still not change. Or did you know there already officially exists countries such as Czechia and The Holy See - much better known in English as The Czech Republic and The Vatican respectively?

Pedantically, the Holy See[1] is the Pope's jurisdiction, which includes his universal ecclesiastical jurisdiction in addition to territorial control of a sovereign state. This state[2], per the treaty establishing it[3], is properly referred to as "Vatican City State" (Stato della Città del Vaticano).

This is understandably confused by the fact that it is the Holy See, not Vatican City State, that maintains foreign relations and participates in international organizations like the UN.

This, I assume, is why the official ISO name associated with country code VA was at some point changed from "Vatican City State (Holy See)" to "Holy See (the)"[4].

Interestingly, both entities issue passports[5].

[1] https://www.vatican.va/

[2] https://www.vaticanstate.va/

[3] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/secretariat_state/archivi...

[4] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:VA

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_and_Holy_See_passports

The UN maintains a list of official country names in six languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic) [1], and UN representatives of the countries can request how they want their country to be written in any of those.

I guess China could request to be called 中国 in English communication in the UN and/or ISO (if I understand your question correctly). The main issue is that if you put up to much friction for other language speakers, they're just going to ignore you/the official standards and do whatever they want, so it becomes a bit self-defeating. I expect this to happen to Turkey as well: English speakers will probably mostly keep using "Turkey" rather than "Türkiye" indefinitely, except in cases where ISO/UN standard are really required.

[1] https://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/ungegn/docs/11th-uncsgn-...

Most people will likely see this only on online forms that lazily just populate their country dropdowns from (pirated copies) of the official ISO database.

https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html

"ISO allows free-of-charge use of its country, currency and language codes from ISO 3166, ISO 4217 and ISO 639, respectively."

Doesn't sound like piracy to me.

Yes, but if you actually try to download the collection (link right above that text), you are presented with a form to pay CHF 300 for this data.

Now I am not a copyright lawyer but this is how I understand it: this entire database is a copyrighted work owned by ISO. If you pay them CHF 300 you can download the database and then use use it freely. But when you gather that entire dataset (transformed or not) back to a full database format, it is still a derived work - the copyright of which is owned by ISO.

This is of course completely hair splitting as you will not see ISO coming after anyone spreading the database in any format (it would be a PR disaster). But if you asked the opinion of a corporate lawyer, they might say you technically need to pay ISO before you can use a copy of the entire database in your app. And I bet that's why they have the form to pay the CHF 300 if someone somewhere has a compliance department telling them to be 100% sure they are not breaching any copyrights..

Maybe someone who actually knows anything about copyright law can comment..

EDIT: The situation is indeed unclear as I predicted, probably on purpose. See here https://datahub.io/core/country-list#license :

> It should be noted that this material is ultimately sourced from ISO and their rights and licensing policy is somewhat unclear. As this is a short, simple database of facts there is a strong argument that no rights can subsist in this collection. However, ISO state on their site:

>> ISO makes the list of alpha-2 country codes available for internal use and non-commercial purposes free of charge.

> This carries the implication (though not spelled out) that other uses are not permitted and that, therefore, there may be rights preventing further general use and reuse.

Likewise, if ISO says they allow "free-of-charge use" of the database, it implies their permission and allowance is required to use it in the first place. This implies that if you embed the database to your app, it contains proprietary material by ISO. This limits your rights for example re-licensing it, as you can not re-license without consent from ISO, the copyright holder.

Again - this is only a theoretical problem, yet the ambiguity is rather annoying to a pedant.

Although I'm not a copyright laywer, I did previously work for an intellectual property services company. The country codes collection is a service they provide designed to make it easy to keep country codes up to date. This doesn't negate the "free-of-charge use" of the database. ISO appear to have clarified this almost 20 years ago: http://xml.coverpages.org/ISOReaffirms.html , and it looks like the situation hasn't changed.

I don't see how your rights would be limited by including it in your app. You can just say the copyright to the ISO database belongs to ISO, but is free-of-charge, and the copyright to the code written by you belongs to you, which is not free of charge, or any license you wish.

Edit: Because I can't reply - CC0, a public domain - like license was released in 2009, well after the clarification of their "free-of-charge use" license.

It would be much better if they simply dedicated this database to the public domain.

In the "clarification" they indeed seem to consider that the database is covered by their copyright, and any free use is subject to their continued benevolence:

> However, ISO and its members do not charge for the use made of the codes contained in these standards, subject to this being consistent with ISO's copyright.

We're way off in speculation land here, but if CH law is like DE law, IIRC it's one of the countries that releasing to the public domain isn't really possible (which is why CC0 exists)

Use Unicode CLDR data.

License: https://unicode.org/copyright.html

Thanks. The actual license for the data files is MIT-like and seems to require attribution: https://www.unicode.org/license.txt

This is better indeed. It is explicit in what it allows (anything) and under which terms (no warranty, attribution required.)

The specific rules around copyright of facts is probably extremely country specific. The US tends to be on the more liberal/not copyrightable side here than Europe.

Use Unicode CLDR data.

https://cldr.unicode.org/

Maybe they're trying to cut down the number of labels that say:

"Fabrique en Dinde"

I'm assuming you're knowingly joking, so for others: 'dinde' is the contraction of French d'Inde, shortened from coq d'Inde or poule d'Inde. So you go to the store and buy some dinde for your sandwich. Fabrique en dinde would mean something is made of turkey (the bird).

Türkiye was, and I presume still in, Turquie in French. So made in Türkiye is Fabriqie en Turquie.

Uh? No, I think the point is that labels "Made in Turkey" ran the risk of being lazily translated to "Fabriqué en Dinde" in French by a misconfigured automatic translation software and you no longer have this problem if you use words spelt differently for the bird and the country. Nothing to do with "d'Inde".

Yep. That comment came remembering the pointing and laughing and explaining it to the kids.

I do tend to check the labels, sometimes there are jokes hidden there.

For example, a computer bag I have from during the Bush Administration has a label with the text:

Ne pas secher a la machiene Ne pas repasser Nous sommes desoles que notre president soit un idiot. Nous n'avons pa vote pour lui.

For those who don't speak French, last two sentences are:

We are sorry that our president is an idiot. We didn't vote for him.

http://www.dzof.org/2004/06/nous-sommes-desoles-que-notre.ht...

And a literal translation of that would be "Middle Kingdom." So if the Middle Kingdom wants to call itself "Middle Kingdom," why not?

The UN can pretend that it's English. Just like how it pretends Taiwan isn't a country. There's no reason why we should go along with it.

Exactly. It's politics, which can take a completely new direction on a whim of a dictator or a regime change. But language, as used in practice, changes much less rapidly.

> Just like how it pretends Taiwan isn't a country

That's because it really isn't. It really should be, but a) they don't really claim to be one (until recently they officially claimed they're the "one and only" China, same as the PRC) and according to polls most people there support that status quo; b) nobody of note recognises them to be.. anything really. As far as most of the world, including the UN, are concerned, Taiwan is the losers of the Chinese Civil war that have some limited exceptions (like performing at Olympics). Contrast this with Kosovo who claim to be an independent country and are somewhat recognised.

> That's because it really isn't.

What's a "country"? You are talking about "sovereign state"–whether or not Taiwan counts as one, or could, depends on which theory of statehood one supports (constitutive or declarative)–but something can be a "country" without being a sovereign state. The ISO 3166-1 list is officially of countries and "dependent territories", but many people talk of those "dependent territories" (especially the more major ones) as "countries". And then people commonly speak of the constituent countries of the UK (England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales) as "countries" – seems particularly common in British English (and more British-influenced English varieties), but one even hears Americans speak of them in that way at times. Fewer people know this, but the Kingdom of the Netherlands is divided into four constituent countries as well (the Netherlands proper – which includes both the European part and the Caribbean islands of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, Saba; Aruba; Curaçao; and Sint Maarten). Similarly, the Kingdom of Denmark is also divided into three countries – Denmark proper, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. And one of France's overseas territories, French Polynesia, is officially classified under French law as an "overseas country" of France. Canada officially recognises Quebec, not as a "country", but as a "nation" (a term which is often used interchangeably with "country").

> Contrast this with Kosovo who claim to be an independent country and are somewhat recognised.

Kosovo is recognised by about 50% of the world's states, including all of the G7 states. They've also been accepted as members of several intergovernmental organisations, including the World Bank and IMF. And yet, unlike Taiwan, ISO still won't give them an official country code - ISO gives the reason that they won't give them a code until the UN Statistical Division gives them a code, and I guess the UN Statistical Division sees it as a political hot potato they don't want to touch.

>One of the stated reasons is that Turkey is homophonic with 'turkey' (the thanksgiving meal), which further has a connotation of 'lousy'. This is 100% real, their current leadership is a bit strange

It's not just a coincidence, the bird was named after Turkey because apparently they were first imported to England via the Middle East and so they were called "Turkey cocks". Other European languages call them literally "India cocks", due to a different import route. So it's a bit silly to change the official name of your country because a bird is named after it.

Oh, that's new information to me. Now I can not wait for Japan to finally change its name (perhaps to Nippon?) to avoid the terrible and vulgar connotation with the Japanese tit..

Tits are gorgeous, though; turkeys are not.

Wild turkeys are. At least in the eye of this beholder :-)

For a similar issue in Japan check the order of Name and Surname, or Surname and Name in English and Japanese, as it has been officially been swapping a few times.

> Other European languages call them literally "India cocks", due to a different import route.

Hence “dinde” in French.

> Other European languages call them literally "India cocks"

Haha in Turkey (Türkiye) turkey is hindi and India is Hindistan, which can be translated as Turkeyland.

Wait, I thought Türkiye is homophone with Turkey? Did you mean Turkey being homograph with turkey (same spelling different meaning). Or is there a pronunciation change I've missed?

Isn't the new name pronounced like turkey-ay? I'm fairly sure I heard it said that way on some news segment about it.

I work with a Turkish woman, and she gave us the rundown of pronunciation. Bref, it's pronounced "turkey-ay."

That's in Turkish though. In English the 'e' at the end of 'Turkiye' could either be silent, as in code and eye, or it could be pronounced as in Kanye. It's likely that both pronunciations will be used, similarly to Porsche and Nike.

Considering that the pronunciation of 'Turkiye' with a silent e is almost identical to the standard pronunciation of 'Turkey', I suspect this will be the primary pronunciation in English and will win out over the "Kanye" pronunciation. This would make 'Turkiye' a purely orthographic change and not a linguistic one.

Fair, so let me clarify: the pronunciation has always been 'turkey-ay', and most other cultures/languages pronounce it correctly (by which I mean in-line with how native Turks pronounce it). English is an outlier.

On the whole, English tends to be far more accepting of foreign spellings and pronunciations than any other language.

The idea that the "correct" spelling and pronunciation for a loanword is that of the source language is very much a quirk of English.

Most languages try to either change the spelling of a new loanword to match how it is pronounced, or vice versa. English tries to keep both and that's why English spelling is such a mess, because there is French orthography, Germany orthography, Greek orthography, etc, all mixed together and the only way to know how to spell a word is to know its etymology.

Imagine telling the French that the Turkish government gets how to decide how the word "Turquie" is spelled in French, rather than the Académie Française. They would die laughing.

I meant that Turkey and turkey are homophones. Apart from the capitilization they are also homographs.

Turkey and Türkiye are not homophonic. The BBC article I linked has a pronunication guide towards the end: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61671913

> One of the stated reasons is that Turkey is homophonic with 'turkey'

I would not even know how to pronounce “Türkiye”, even if I were willing to.

Yeah, it's strange and short-sighted (to me) that this kind of reasoning drives language changes. You really should want and treasure having an ages-weathered or weird exonym in the target language, preferably going back to Middle Ages or something. This suggests (on the perception level, that's what we're talking about) that you are a serious and established entity and your relations with the world go way, way back.

Look up England, Germany (and maybe Holy See) here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_names_in_vario... At least Slavic names for Germany even have negative undertones (something like 'mute people'). With changing the name you are trashing all that, and it's doubtful that it really changes much in the perception by itself.

I wonder if Georgia should ask to be called Sakartvelo (which is how it's called in Georgian language), just to stop those "the country, not the state" clarifications when talking to US people.

It has a umlaut and a dotted i in the uppercase version. Totally metal.

I encourage you to not read much from the New Yorker then!

This is a naïve take which I find über annoying. Maybe I'll tell my local café owner, Emily Brontë, about it.

I get your point, but the fact is these (except maybe for Brontë) commonly get spelled without the diacritics.

That doesn't mean spelling them with the diacritics makes them not English.

French was the official language of England for quite some time so English and French have a special relationship, and any of the French diacritics are acceptable in English. English also has native use of the umlaut mark for as diaeresis e.g. coördinate.

For non-French diacritics, it is on a case-by-case basis. Most English speakers would accept ñ and even write it e.g "El Niño event". Nordic ø is questionable but would be accepted in place names. Phở is right out.

> Most English speakers would accept ñ and even write it e.g "El Niño event"

FWIW this may be true in the USA but in the UK and other non-NA English-speaking countries I don't think this holds.

You will definitely see jalapeños and such on UK food packaging. I just searched the bbc website for "jalapeño" and found this page [0] which uses both spellings (!). It also links to a page on "habañero" (sic) so yeah you can say that British familiarity with Ñ is somewhat of a mixed bag.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/jalapeno_chilli

It’s a name, how can you tell if a name is “in English”?

ISO is not in charge of the English language. I don't expect dictionaries to change any time soon just because ISO says so. Turkey has been the proper English translation for their country name since a very long time and it will be correct English for a long time. Of course, with English it is a bit unclear in any case who decides what is and isn't correct. Certainly not the Turkish government or ISO.

What's next? The Germans insisting on Deutschland as the official ISO name (it's still Germany)? The Chinese insisting on using chines characters? I'm not sure why ISO did this. It sounds political to me.

If you need place name translations, geonames is a decent data set: https://www.geonames.org/export/

You can look up the correct translations and transliterations by iso country and language code. It still calls Turkey by its English name, as it should.

In 2016, the country formerly known as The Czech Republic declared that its English name was now Czechia.

This is now its official ISO name, how it shows up in the Geonames database, and how it is commonly referred to in places like news media.

A small nitpick, the country isn't "formerly known as the Czech Republic".

"Czechia" was adopted as the new official short name. The long name is still also correct.

So this is why it's good to pay attention to deeply nested HN threads. Because I didn't realise this was the case - media covered the "Czech Republic is now 'Czechia'" thing and my friend group are split about 80/20 (majority using "Czech Republic", inc. me). I'm glad to hear both are technically correct!

To be completely fair, the context in which it's still called "The Czech Republic" is the same context that you would say "The Federal Republic of Germany"

Technically that’s true, but it has never been common to refer to the country as “The Federal Republic of Germany” so it’s not quite the same thing

I don't disagree (and I certainly would never correct anyone who says Czech Republic), but "Federal Republic of Germany" usage was fairly common before Germany was reunited.

People would say "I'm going to visit my brother in Federal Republic of Germany", or "I'm going to ... West Germany?". That doesn't sound right

> If you need place name translations, geonames is a decent data set: https://www.geonames.org/export/

That’s a great resource to keep around, thanks! A convenient source for the unfortunately common “but you must not translate place names” argument.

Official? Sure. Actual, in the English language name? No.

I mean there's the official name, which has a canonical standard value and we can answer with an easy "yes" or "no."

And then there's this fuzzy "actual English language" question about, which is pretty hard to answer, and verges on philosophical "what even is a language/what is a name?" wankery. I can't see how you give a simple yes/no answer to that.

> I can't see how you give a simple yes/no answer to that.

I'm looking into my crystal ball and seeing the ~0 people who will be able to remember the slightly different and alien-looking-to-English spelling, and the even smaller value of ~0 who will ever be bothered to use the umlaut.

If language is just decided by popular vote, somebody should tell the English that they are using English wrong -- there are many more Americans after all.

Well—that's exactly the case, and that's why you see different usage guides and dictionaries for American English and British English. "Correct" usage, for values of correct that favor clarity for a given audience, does indeed differ substantially between American and British English, among many other variants and dialects.

What has minimal effect is some international standards body trying to dictate usage. Today, and likely for a long time to come, if not indefinitely, "Turkey" is less distracting or confusing to practically any English-speaking audience one might choose, than the new thing. The new one's odd-enough looking (again, even just considering the letter order) and the old one enough entrenched that I expect the old form to be the better choice for communication in English for a long time.

No its not. This is not French, we don't have a governing body. And they def can't expect us to use a name with characters we can't even type. No way am I looking up to copypasta the name every time I need to use it.

They probably defer to the UNGEGN[0] which allows countries to submit the official name of their country in various languages. Turkey recently requested to change their official English name[1].

[0] https://unstats.un.org/unsd/ungegn/working_groups/wg1.cshtml

[1] https://turkiye.un.org/en/184798-turkeys-name-changed-turkiy...

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