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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3196 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).

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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