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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

"Türkiye", not "Turkiye". I suppose there really is something to the Turkey Test!

That said, I don't know how bad ü -> u is in Turkish. At least in German, doing so often changes the meaning, and äöü have to be transliterated as ae, oe, ue instead. (Obviously a ton of software does something bad like "decompose Unicode characters and filter out non-ASCII letters" and gets it wrong, also hilariously failing the test.)

And in general, sure, every country should get to decide how it wants to be referred to (although I suppose that can raise complicated questions as to who gets to decide that too), but in any case asking a blog from 2008 to retroactively adopt that decision is asking for a bit much, I'd say.

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> That said, I don't know how bad ü -> u is in Turkish. At least in German, doing so often changes the meaning, and äöü have to be transliterated as ae, oe, ue instead. (Obviously a ton of software does something bad like "decompose Unicode characters and filter out non-ASCII letters" and gets it wrong, also hilariously failing the test.)

Ü and Ö have almost the same sounds as German in Turkish. When they constructed the Latin-based script for Turkish, they looked at the European languages and their ways of writing. So no surprises there.

Writing ü as u change meaning a lot. "Kul" means a servant; while "kül" is ash. However Turkish lacks the concept of digraphs. Having two vowels next to each other is extremely rare. If two vowels like oe are put together, a native reader will read them as o e (oh eh) and then maybe blend them a little.

So when technology got introduced, we didn't know what to do with ASCII-only systems that Americans sold to us. People started to write ü,ö,ı,ş,ç,ğ as u,o,i,s,c,g. It causes names of the people to be mispronounced in (usually English speaking) media and in international environments. Many young people started to use SMS with those conversions in 90s. So we are stuck.

No idea about ü → u, but dotless to dotted i can be lethal: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73

Oh, German definitely has those too :)

tuerkiye

Realistically, the choice is going to be between Turkey and Turkiye. Most people aren't going to go through the hassle of adding the umlaut. Countries can request that people refer to them anything within reason, and in this case reason dictates that it be constrained by ASCII characters like every other country in the world. I think people might make the exception within certain formal contexts, but not in a random Hacker News post.

Not every other country in the world only uses ASCII, Ivory Coast is officially called Republic of Côte d'Ivoire.

You're demonstrating the exact point by showing that they have an ASCII name and an official one. If you're having a regular conversation with someone you're probably going to use Ivory Coast and not the French name.

...or, as some languages do, even "translate" it by pronounciation: Kotdivuāra

That's arguably an English name, not an "ASCII name". (If there was one, it would probably be "Cote d'Ivoire".)

"Türkiye" is not a word in English. When schoolchildren learn English, they learn the alphabet, and there are no diacritics. It's as simple as that. The Ottoman rump state can request spelling changes, and we're happy to oblige, but they can't request alphabet changes and get acquiessence.

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

It's obviously up to you how you spell things in English, but why do you draw the line at alphabets? I've definitely seen diacritics used in some proper nouns in English texts for which I have no reason to suspect diplomatic/political pressure.

As I see it, you either oblige with the Turkish government's request to use the Turkish instead of English word for the country (which is what it really is), or you don't – it has nothing to do with alphabets.

Whether people will practically go through the effort of setting up their keyboard layout in a way that lets them type it is a different story; I can't really blame anyone for not doing so in a casual context. Wikipedia usually does so – e.g. they currently use "Turkey", but would likely use "Türkiye" if they were to adopt that.

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