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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3200 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).

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.

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