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Comment by HL33tibCe7 | Hacker News Reader

> Türkiye

Sorry but this is ridiculous. In any language, we have different names for places than in those places’ native languages, and that’s perfectly normal. “Türkiye” is impossible for a native English speaker to parse - it isn’t even written in our alphabet. Are we to start writing Sweden as “Sverige”, or Kazakhstan as “ Қазақстан”? Should we start pronouncing “Paris” “Pah-reee”? We don’t do either of those, because we understand that languages have their own names for places, and don’t want to insult native speakers by butchering the pronunciation.

Rant over.

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Even more insane is Erdogan is demanding Turkish Airlines rebrand themselves. It’s heartbreaking to see the hard work of everyone at Turkish Airlines wasted by such a strange decision. It’s probably Turkey’s most recognizable brands and extremely well respected internationally.

what will be the new name ?

Türk Hava Yolları, I guess?

Erdogan Airlines

Goes with the trend of him selling the entire country off to arabs for personal profit!

I could take that complaining seriously if English had single unified spelling system, but as you do each world different anyway, I don't think it is too much to ask to throw some umlauts there and adopt the official spelling.

I don't think the average literate English reader really knows how to parse an umlaut - I sure don't.

And while the spelling system isn't necessarily consistent I don't see why we should change words that people do know how to pronounce to ones that we don't?

We don’t have an equivalent vowel sound to “ü” in English at all. It’s something German learners struggle with.

Do you mean to say that a strange character in one word keeps you from tokenizing the sentence? And hence you cannot make sense of the whole sentence because of that one character (syntax parsing → semantics)? Or do you simply mean that you don’t understand what that one single character is supposed to represent (or just sound like)?

The sound like bit.

I have no real problem with writing "Turkiye" if that's what those from the country prefer - but I don't even know how to type an umlaut on my keyboard. So in that sense, yes, it is too much to ask. I'm not going to pull up a virtual keyboard or google "how to type umlaut" to make a passing reference to a country.

Germans have umlauts and they usually put an "e" after the normal character. You can see this with domain names, for instance: https://buero.de/ (not affiliated) for büro

If you're on windows you can press Win + . (Period) to bring up a character selector, which includes emojis along with various accented characters and others from non-english alphabets

I agree, but it's not as simple as that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey#Official_name_change

I think it's weird that newspapers use it. The UN is a different thing, there are a bunch of official country names that are not colloquially used, but ultimately people will gravitate to call them the same name they ve been using for centuries. It's not a complete name change like Ceylon -> sri lanka

Reminiscent of changing the collective English world's spelling of Kiev to Kyiv when both are just approximations of the real pronunciation, lol.

That's not entirely true. Kiev derives from the Russian Ки́ев, whereas Kyiv derives from the Ukrainian Київ--note that the Cyrillic orthography differs between the two languages.

One of the main reasons for the conscious effort to shift spelling is the fact that Russia is trying to invade Ukraine partly on the basis that Ukraine wasn't actually a real country and Ukrainians are just Russians. In that context, using Russian place names over Ukrainian place names for Ukrainian localities can be seen as a tacit endorsement of this claim, and this is why so many entities are consciously making efforts to use translation from Ukrainian, rather than Russia. (Although I, and apparently many others, seem to have to a hard time with "Odesa/Odessa").

I mean either way it's a transliteration that's still not accurate to either pronunciation in its original form by sound. I don't have a problem with these sorts of political changes, just the way the wind blows, but it is funny to me when someone who doesn't speak either language attempts to correct other English speakers pronunciation when it's still not how a native Ukrainian would say it. Languages bastardize place names universally, there's no right way to say most places in most languages, they're all equally wrong.

That's how languages acquire words for foreign things, though. English also calls a certain plant "tea", because that's how the English heard the people they bought it from call it, even though in China and India they called it "cha" or "chai". English also calls a certain nation "Japan", which is quite distant from its endonymous "Nihon" or "Nippon", because that's what they heard from European explorers.

That Western Europe heard the name of a city from Russians first rather from its inhabitants is no different.

You could type Tuerkiye like Germans do for umlauts. While the rest applies, it removes the how-do-I-type-that problem.

The U is not the only problem though:

"Türkiye".toLocaleUpperCase("tr-TR") 'TÜRKİYE'

Do you mean, like the Deutsch?

That requires an IME that will modify the input text. EN-US doesn't do that.

I mean one can type it like this (with meatware).

> “Türkiye” is impossible for a native English speaker to parse - it isn’t even written in our alphabet.

That seems like a minor problem. A lot of country names are learned from exposure rather than a pure phonetic reading.

E.g. should Liechtenstein be spelt Licktenstine to make it easier for an English native to parse?

Honestly, yes, and it would have been, like all other country names, except it’s barely used so it hasn’t been.

It's also editorializing the title IMO, unless CNBC has updated their title since this was posted.

It was originally Türkiye in the CNBC article, but they’ve edited it

Absolutely gutted that you had to witness a non-English-alphabet character on the internet today. I hope you find the inner strength to recover. Thoughts and prayers for you and your family.

99 percent of the time the top comment on this site is completely worth ignoring. This is also the case here. Typical ignorance, ignore, move along

Ignoring my comment while claiming I’m the ignorant one. Interesting move.

Didn't stop a massive effort to change the English spelling and pronunciation of Kiev to the difficult to pronounce (for English speakers) Kyiv to pretend like it stuck it to Putin somehow. Along those lines next time Germany invades its neighbors we might as well adopt the Czech name for it (Nemecko, or land of the mutes) as an insult to stick it to the Krauts. Or if Hungary acts up we can use an archaic Czech name for Hungary that also means land of the pimples (Uhersko). I get the feeling Czechs didn't like their neighbors much.

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