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Comment by xps | Hacker News Reader

Should Turkey decide how their country is called in other languages?

America is "Měiguó" in Chinese.

I'm pretty sure the Chinese decide for themselves what they want to call America.

In general I think yes. People should be able to decide what they want to be called. I think it is really strange that we assign names to countries.

Imagine if I asked you what your name was then ignored what you said and pronounced that I would be called you Frank. That would be quite rude.

That's the story of my life, unless you speak French you will probably pronounce my name wrong, no matter how many times I repeat it and help people pronounce it, I don't get mad nor think it's rude, it's kind of amusing actually. Once I realize they can't handle it I just tell people to call me by my last name which is very easy to say in English. There are too many interesting things in life to get hung up on a petty detail like a name.

Hey if you write your name out as LAST First (which I see many French people do) then you might not even have to ask people to call you by your first name.

Most of the time (and all of the time with gendered pronouns), you don't use it to address me. You're using it to talk about me. And then, it's really between you two what you call me, isn't it? Of course I would be happier knowing you didn't refer to me in a rude manner, or as something I'm not, but I believe in privacy too, so it's really your business.

Turkey isn't rude, and it's usually understood from context that we don't refer to the bird (the Turkish government also push Türkiye on countries where the native word has no bird connotation). We used to translate all names, and that's understandable because names are often unpronounceable or otherwise violate grammatical rules if you just blindly drop them in a different language. I think it should be fine to use "Turkey" when talking to another English-speaker.

It's a bit more complicated than that. It is also quite rude of you, where you not to not accept that other people write using other letters have have other abilities in terms of what phonemes they can pronounce.

I see a distinction between mapping a name more or less faithfully to the sounds and spelling of a language and coming up with a completely different name. For example Brazil in English is not the same as Brasil but is fairly close and fits the language. Whereas IDK where Germany came from.

> Whereas IDK where Germany came from.

Von den Germanen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_peoples

I'm not a fan of this modern idea that you should get to dictate how others refer to you. E.g. I don't think it makes sense to refer to China as Middle Country for anyone not from China.

Sometimes, sometimes not. Everybody changed Peking to Beijing when China requested that. But living in Netherland, I shake my head at all the languages insisting on pluralising the name of my country. And that's not even addressing "Dutch".

I'm 100% opposed to telling people how to speak their language. I don't even like telling people who use English as a lingua franca how to use it in a culturally "correct" way.

Normally, I'm outspoken against most "domestic" proposals to change words, since the rationale and implementation are usually very poor.

But as an American, I've decided that Turkiye without the ü is more desirable than Turkey. It resolves an annoyingly ambiguous search term, doesn't change anything about how it's pronounced, reads the exact same way, and it's trivial to switch how I write it. It really is a superior design with a painless transition.

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