Why is "turkey" lowercased? For that matter the country's official name is Türkiye as of 2022.
They don't have any authority to manage other people's languages.
The lack of capitalization is an obvious error, though. Before clicking, I wondered if some accidental discovery in turkeys (as birds) resulted in better human hair growth.
And that's fine. I mentioned Türkiye because at least one smart-ass would correct me otherwise. But "turkey" is a bird. For it to be a country it's at least gotta be "Turkey".
Whyever not? It's their stated preference. And it's hardly the same kind of change as "China" vs. "Zhōngguó" or "Germany" vs. "Deutschland". It's just a slightly different spelling and pronunciation of the same word. You can change your ways.
Another country's official name in English is "Republic of Türkiye". Since 2022.
In both cases, that is what officials from the country expect the country to be called, when using the English language.
For instance here
(But yeah, personally I would capitalised both counties regardless of spelling/which name used.)
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/08/1147704945/the-state-departme...
Any country should have the respect to have their names spelled out as they prefer, the PITA is the keyboards. I speak for myself, but when I type Turkey I mean the country with no subliminal diss.
It's the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse.
This headline makes it sound like the IT systems of a cosmetic surgeon have been attacked by poultry.
The etymology here is interesting and has a looooong history. The country has officially been named Türkiye for over a century.
[0] https://unterm.un.org/unterm2/en/view/745bbc2a-fc50-4b94-bb9...
The problem with the turkey rebranding is that it was a mere orthographic update, but it is using orthography that is very non standard(whatever that means for English), including using a diacritic rarely seen in English.
I could get behind it more if they completely changed the name, like a when Swaziland switched to eswatini. But for now, you can pry turkey from my cold dead hands
We can choose not to do it, I guess, but place names change all the time. Istanbul vs Constantinople. New York vs New Amsterdam. Myanmar vs Burma. Czechia vs Czech Republic. Swaziland vs Eswatini.
Big fan of Thanksgiving foods I see.
(Do you see the real problem? Lowercasing a proper noun that has another meaning when lowercased. Turkey/Türkiye is just the cherry on top)
Frankly I dispute that Türkiye can be the English name given it contains a non-English letter.
It's "Eswatini" with a capital letter and no, it's not a complete change. In both cases the word means the place of the Swazi/Swati people. If you're not aware that Southern African languages use prefixes such as "e-" as well as suffixes (like e.g. the suffix "-land" in English) then I guess it's harder to recognise the word stem. But they are related terms, not a "complete change".
So here's your why: because they asked you to and you are better at it than they are. If you need smug superiority, you could use that too, I guess.
People change their names and nick names all the time. I don't go and check every value of theirs before I use their new name. It's really not that complicated.
I don't think we are required to start calling it Turkey in the vernacular. Regular Turkish people don't have to change their names for countries in their language either. I only pointed out Turkey/Türkiye in my original post to head off smart-asses. Using proper casing for the name is much more important.
They can call themselves what they want, but it unreasonable of the Turks to expect English speakers to write their country's name with characters which are not part of our alphabet.