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Comment by m00dy | Hacker News Reader

Turkish Government needs to take a look at this.

Do you mean the Turkiye government? ;)

(Reference to the recent news item that Erdogan made a public statement in which he renamed Turkey to Turkiye in English.)

Türkiye, to be precise.

Do countries get to declare how their names are spelled in other languages?

I'd say so. Czechia may offer a fairly recent example of name change.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_the_Czech_Republic#A...

They do, but only because the English-speaking world is peculiarly susceptible to this sort of manipulation. It started with Burma->Myanmar and Peking->Beijing, something nobody should have taken seriously.

Nobody gets mad that Spaniards say "Londres" instead of London. It's funny how it's mostly despotic regimes that get so twisted up about these foreign linguistic matters.

I think a country at least gets to decide what it calls itself in english. For example in official documents that they translate to english. Or what they teach in schools as the 'correct spelling'. Now if the rest of the world follows that is another question. Languages don't have owners.

I still refer to “Myanmar” by its true name, Burma!

Excuse me? Of course! Do people get to declare their name and pronoun?

If that's your whole reasoning I think "of course!" is an overstatement.

HN really needs an /s every time.

So Germany really decided that its name in English is "Germany" and not "Deutchland"?

I always assumed those names originated externally.

I’m pretttttty sure it originates locally! Why would the U.S. tell China to call us “Meiguo”, and why would China listen?

People generally do not get to declare how their name is spelled in a foreign language. It's determined by the government issuing them the document containing their foreign-spelled name. (Depends on the country of course, but this is typical)

Of course they do! For my Bulgarian papers i was asked to spell my name in latin script however i wanted, and when i moved to France I was asked how is my name spelled, and i could change it if i want to (e.g. if i had an s in my name between vowels, in French it'd be read as z; in that case i could have changed the spelling to have ss, which is always read as s).

It is fine by me

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