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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3193 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 16, 2023

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Listening to a news broadcast recently, I noticed the country Turkey is now called Turkiya

This didn't seem to be part of a broader trend of using non-anglicised forms (the same news report referred to Sweden and Germany, not Sverige and Deutschland). Why Turkiya, why now?

The change happened last year as a nationalist PR move by Erdogan, partially motivated by annoyance at having the same name as a dumb-looking bird and partially by a sense of pride in being able to force foreigners to use their endonym. More broadly, there does seem to have been a slightly higher rate of country name changes in the past few years (Turkey to Türkiye, Czech Republic to Czechia, Swaziland to eSwatini, and Macedonia to North Macedonia).

Typical insecure nationalist thing. This will have no other result (after should popularity boost) that people all over the world, even ones who do not care about Turkey at all, would call the country T-U-R-K-E-Y with great relish to the end of time. Because Erdogan does not have any power to "force foreigners to use their endonym".

Chad move would be to embrace brave and noble Turkey as your national bird, build giant statues of majestic turkeys in Turkish national costume elsewhere, paint all airplanes in turkey colors, put traditional turkey dishes in every restaurant and bask in the free name recognition. No one knows what is "Türkiye" and no one cares. Everyone heard about the bird.

Yes, I know that Benjamin Franklin never proposed to make the glorious gobbler American national symbol, but he should have.

They're going to struggle to get anglophones to use an umlaut when our alphabet doesn't have them.

That hasn't seemed to have harmed Häagen-Dazs, so I am not too worried.

Probably because they're not demanding that people actually use their fake Danish diacritics.

Wasn't Macedonia's change a result of international politics rather than internal? I.e. Greece took issue with it?

I recall that being a longstanding issue.

Also there was a funny part with the previous name and UN seating, which is alphabetical.

Macedonia was officially known as "The Republic of Macedonia". They wanted to be seated under "M".

Greece insisted they should be called "The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" and seated under "Y".

The compromise was to seat them under "T" for "The".

Very little foresight here in not changing their name to "AAA Expert Macedonia 2021" -- I guess the leaders are too young to remember the Yellow Pages or something?

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