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Comment by IncreasePosts | Hacker News Reader

Is it a right of any nation to assert what other nations call it? Can America ask China to stop calling them 美国 (Měiguó) and call them the USA?

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

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Yes? It's obviously the case that countries can ask this?

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.

> But for now, you can pry turkey from my cold dead hands

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)

Yes, compare Czech Republic-> Czechia. No problem typing that out, no problem updating my mental map of the world.

Frankly I dispute that Türkiye can be the English name given it contains a non-English letter.

I was gearing up to suggest that diaeresis very absolute valid English, but dug in a bit. It's not just a u with a diacritic. Ü is a separate letter in Turkish, with a more "ooh" or "ouh" like sound. TIL.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)

> if they completely changed the name, like a when Swaziland switched to eswatini.

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".

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swazi_people

It's governed through the United Nations[0].

[0] https://unterm.un.org/unterm2/country

If you need an example, look at the Peking->Beijing transition.

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pekin Turkish still uses the old term. Why should I change my language to suit them if they won't do it for others.

That attitude is, frankly, pretty misanthropic. "Why should I do anything for anyone who doesn't do it for me first" is how you get nowhere.

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 see why I should follow the demands of an authoritarian president who encourages ethnic cleansing in the Caucasus and represses ethnic minorities in his own country. Especially when they won't do it for others.

Oh, extremely fuck Erdogan. Despots don't deserve the time of day. If that's your reason to keep it Turkey, then fine. Probably still not turkey, though. We can check back after Erdogan is gone and see how you feel about Türkiye then.

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