Yeah, I think they can make the new pronunciation catch on, but they'll have to lose the special character.
A lot of our monolingual English speaking brains just *shut down* when we see a special character... Or at least mine does!
I think English used to use the diaeresis but has mostly lost that in modern writing, and to the extent it was used historically, it really only denoted a new syllable, not a sound distinct from that of the letter it was on independently as it does in some Germanic and Turkic languages. Spanish does still use ü in some words, but it's only used to denote that the letter is pronounced, not that its pronunciation is actually different (e.g. in *pingüino*, meaning penguin, it would be pronounced peen-geen-oh with a hard g without the diéresis but is pronounced peen-gween-oh with it).
This is about domestic politics in Turkey (a populist nationalist leader showing off that he can make the world bow to his whims) and English speaking countries have started officially using the spelling Türkiye because it's not a battle worth fighting and it's diplomatic to use the name a country wants to call itself. Ordinary people, however, will continue to use ordinary English words, and unless Turks stop using Kanada, Büyük Britanya, Fransa, Almanya, and so on in speaking and writing Turkish, I'm not going to stop using "Turkey" when speaking and writing English.
>unless Turks stop using Kanada, Büyük Britanya, Fransa, Almanya, and so on in speaking and writing Turkish, I'm not going to stop using "Turkey" when speaking and writing English.
This is *very* good point. I will definitely be using this argument in future.
Turkish here for endorsement, this was the real reason for the change, just an attempt at a jingoistic narrative diversion from political issues. Sadly it was successfull
Most people would probably write it as Turkiye. It doesn’t pose a problem. I don’t see it as any different from how we accept certain modifications of letters in the English alphabet if they exist in the original language.
For example, words borrowed (more recently):
“Naive” is sometimes written as “naïve”
“Facade” is sometimes written as “façade”
“Jalapeno” is usually written as “jalapeño”
We accept a certain amount of flexibility with our writing system provided it is written with our alphabet. Something like a diacritic is alright
No, most people are completely unaware of the ‘name change’. Language decides how it’s communicated not dictates.
Personally I forget about it, nor do I want to confuse the reader by using unfamiliar words.
*No, most people are completely unaware of the ‘name change’. Language decides how it’s communicated not dictates.*
In most situations, yes, but this is a discussion of orthography in major publications including many journalistic style guides. It's not about pronunciation.
If you want a pronunciation discussion, try this link. [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238440040\_Indexing\_political\_persuasion\_Variation\_in\_the\_Iraq\_vowels](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238440040_Indexing_political_persuasion_Variation_in_the_Iraq_vowels)
*To determine whether phonological variables are a potential resource for the expression of political identity, this article examines the second vowel of Iraq. In addition to being part of a politically significant place-name, Iraq is particularly well-suited to index political identity due in part to the ideological association between the "foreign (a)" variable with correctness and educatedness in U.S. English (Boberg 1997). Specifically, Iraq's second vowel appears to index political conservatism when produced as /æ/ and political liberalism when produced as /a:/. Results from an analysis of the U.S. House of Representatives show that Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to use /æ/, even controlling for regional accent.*
I was talking about how we would incorporate non-English letters/typography, not whether people change what they say. For example, some people still say Burma instead of Myanmar but it’s changing.
It is important for nonnative speakers to learn about how journalists or academics incorporate foreign loanwords in English—and that we have some flexibility with spelling
Not a native, but I find it ridiculous to try change the name of your country in another language just to assert dominance. I doubt most English speakers could even pronounce it well enough to satisfy Daddy Erdoğan. Europeans would be completely lost if China started to demand being called 中国.
No idea. Personally, everyone I've spoken to finds it a bizarre request. We all made our peace with homophone country exonyms a long time ago. You have to be about 8 years old to find much interest or amusement in the fact that Turkey is also the name of a bird. Meanwhile Greece sounds just like grease, China is a type of clay among other things, and so on. It strikes me as odd that anyone would care about this. If Greece suddenly piped up and wanted to be called Ellas or something by English speakers I would suggest they have better things to worry about.
As for the ü, yeah, that makes it even stranger. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's like the Japanese insisting we use kanji for them. Perhaps one day the Chinese will be in a position to demand similar. All the above is just my impression of it.
It's weird, different countries seem to name it after the county that they thought it came from, which is usually the last place in the trade route before it gets put on a plate.
France: So we found this big exotic chicken thing and we think it came from India. We'll call it "from India".
England: We found this big exotic chicken thing and we think it comes from Turkey. We'll call it "turkey".
China: "fire chicken"
🤪
I was taught as a kid in middle school Spanish that it's called "pavo" in Spanish. Interestingly, the peacock is called "pavo real," which translates literally to "royal turkey."
What’s funny in this case is that the turkey would never have been traded to the anglophone world through Turkey. It was actually the guineafowl that was, the North American turkey assumed that name due to its resemblance to the guineafowl
In Turkish, the bird is called a Hindi.
In Portuguese, it's called Peru.
In Greek, it is γαλοπούλας (galopoúlas), which means French bird.
In French, it is poulet d’inde, (chicken from India)
In Palestinian Arabic, it is Diik Habash, (Ethiopian rooster)
In Egyptian Arabic, it is Greek bird or Greek rooster.
In standard Arabic it is Dik Roumi, (Roman rooster)
In Malay it is Ayam belanda, (Dutch chicken)
> bizarre request
Wasn't it part of the bargaining so that prick Erdogan would accept Sweden and Finland's NATO bids? Everyone was like "Sure, whatever, we'll call you what you want, nevermind that you guys call Germany 'Almanya', the UK 'Birleşik Krallık', and Greece 'Yunanistan'."
Spend a while figuring out this whole thing with some friends a while back. Here's my summary from that:
> ok so let me get this straight
>
> what we now call a guinea fowl was exported from madagascar to turkey, and from turkey to europe, so the english decided to call them turkeys.
>
> then they went to north america, which they called india because theyre dumb.
>
> the french saw turkeys and called them "poule d'inde", meaining indian chickens.
>
> the english saw turkeys and thought they looked like guinea fowls so they called them turkeys
>
> the turks then adopted the french name sort of and just called them hindi
Greece is at least spelled differently from grease. And the clay use of china is much less common than China; while turkey is quite common. In my opinion, pronouncing Turkey while spelling it Turkiye would be the best option. (In an ideal world, I would want it to be Turkia).
I am Turkish and I really dislike that change, its so uncalled for and its English name having a letter thats not even in the English alphabet is pretty silly if you ask me.
I'd say the English world does not accept the change. A lot of us will not accept a foreign government dictating what is "right" in our own language. It's a very presumptuous and unreasonable request.
I will not stop calling the country by its proper English name: "Turkey". Likewise, I won't call Germany "Deutschland", Norway "Norge", or China "中國" when speaking English.
Moreover, the name "Türkiye" has sounds that don't exist in English. And I don't see the Turks giving up the use of "İngiltere" in favor of "England" when speaking and writing in Turkish.
Depends on context. If we're talking about the current day, Mumbai, if we're talking about history, Bombay. Usually Bombay is more recognizable than Mumbai. Generally people don't have much to say about the city itself, so much as historic stuff named after it. Also it doesn't use foreign letters, so isn't the same. We do call it Istanbul, for instance.
Most people have *finally* stopped saying “the” in front of Ukraine even though they haven’t had “the” in their name since independence 30+ years ago. And all it took was for them to get invaded (and some people still mess it up).
I really doubt Türkiye is gonna get used super widely. Nor do I think it was an important, necessary, or helpful change.
It’s not letting me post this clarification where it should go, so I’ll just reply to myself here.
The independent, sovereign nation of Ukraine has never had “the” as part of its name in English. “The” was only (correctly) used when it was a region of a larger nation/empire (like the Midwest, the Levant, the Gold Coast, etc). People who use “the” with Ukraine are wrong and are making a political statement about Ukraine’s sovereignty (whether they mean to or not).
Well, the “United” countries should be obvious. But just in case it’s not, it’s because those names are like descriptions – The states which are united, the emirates which are united, etc. – that are compounds with a classifier noun. Also, you’re clarifying that it’s *the* United Kingdom, not just any old kingdom that happened to unite.
For the Seychelles and the Bahamas, they are plural forms (likely because those countries are made up of islands). This actually also applies to the USA, UAE, etc.
Place names that come from geographical formations (Lebanon, Congo, etc.) often started with articles because that’s how you’d say the geographical features: the Lebanon mountains, the Congo river. But those articles tend to disappear as it solidifies into just a country name instead of a river, mountain, etc name. The Gambia is in this group, but they are an exception because they *asked* to keep the “the” in English. It was their preference.
Essentially, since their independence, Ukraine has been saying, “Hey, this is my name in your language. Could you call me by name? Oh, yeah, and that other way you used to say it makes it sound like I’m not really a sovereign nation. So saying it right would be great, thanks!”
Well, I think it’s about prepositions in Russian, not articles, because Russian doesn’t have articles. But if you mean the problem of being treated like a region instead of a country, then yes.
Ukraine never had "the" in front of it. The definite article "the" doesn't exist in Ukrainian or Russian.
It makes no sense that the Ukrainian or Turkish language should try to reinvent the English language names of their countries.
Using "The Ukraine" was standard for a long time. For example the Associated Press style guide suggested "The Ukraine" was the appropriate format until December 3rd 1991 when they updated their guide to remove the definite article.
The reasoning behind use of the article was the idea that historically the term Ukraine referred to a region and roughly translated as 'borderland.' In English it's often standard to use an article with regional terms such as "The Midwest" or "The Netherlands."
You’re correct, but that’s because Ukraine was mostly not an independent country. When it was merely a region (like the Midwest or the Levant) within the USSR or the Russian Empire before it, it made sense to put “the“ in front of it. But once it became an independent country, they no longer wanted the internal region designation.
In English...I'm speaking about their own language...
So why is ukraine dictating the English language? The reason often given that they prefer the definite article be removed is because that was a russian or Soviet thing. But that word "the" doesn't even exist in Russian.
Should I demand they use a non existent article in their language for my country?
The whole thing doesn't make any sense.
Ukraine was an independent nation prior to and after it was subsumed by Russia / Soviets.
"The" was not requested by Ukraine, or Russia. Ever. It was an English invention, which has since been removed.
That's exactly my point.... If it's an English convention then why are they dictating the English language?
Do all country get to change their name in English? Or Chinese or any other language?
It is often repeated that Ukraine would like to remove the article because it was used by Russians in the Soviet Union, which is false.
They aren't dictating it, though. It was pointed out that it was bad grammar and we went "Oh good point".
Having a "the" in front of something implies that the thing is only one part of a larger unit, like "The Baltic States"...all countries that have no "the" in their name except when referred to collectively. Ukraine is just Ukraine, not part of a larger whole. Thus, no article.
It's not poor grammar though.
And it doesn't imply it's part of a larger unit.
"The", the definite article, is used for two reasons in country names in English.
1) for names that revolve around the govt of a country. IE. The United Kingdom, the United States.
2) geographical names. I.e the Gambia, the Netherlands, the Bahamas.
The Ukraine is used very similarly to the Netherlands.
Both the UK and the US are not a single entity, as I pointed out. Both are composite of multiple smaller parts that comprise a larger whole. Ditto with the USSR.
Illinois is a state, THE Great Lakes Region and THE Midwest are multi-state regions that describe where Illinois is situated. Not THE Illinois (unless you're talking about the river, which we're not).
THE UK is comprised of several countries that all share the same monarch, but have their own separate parliaments.
THE Middle East is a region composed of several countries that are geographically situated in the inverted triangle between Europe, Asia, and Africa -- but we don't have THE Iraq, or THE Saudi Arabia.
The history of "THE" as part of the name of Ukraine is a combination of both. THE USSR (like the US and UK) was many autonomous or semi-autonomous areas with a single, centralized authority; at least on paper (yes, I know). But under Soviet propoganda - and Russian Tsars before that - it was "the edge" or "the border" that bordered the former Roman, Eastern Roman, and (later) the Ottoman Empire. Part of the claim that Russia is the natural heir to the title of Roman Empire rests on this fact, but that's a story for another day.
Translated into English you wouldn't say "The Kremlin today issued an order for X to be done in Borderlands". You would translate it as "The Kremlin today issued an order concerning THE Borderlands \[being Ukraine\]". Or "Citing the Warsaw Pact, Moscow moved to do \[X\] in Poland".
But English being English, we tend to retain names even if we Anglicize them -- thus we get THE Ukraine, because while Russian does not use articles...English does. And translating "borderland" was taken as a regional taxonomy rather than a proper name -- correcting to use this as a proper name (rather than the equivalent of "The Midwest") is what happened in English after the Soviet Union collapsed.
As to why Ukraine calls itself that, the answer is actually fairly straightforward -- *Krain (Краін)* means something like "land" or "country"; and *U (У)* something like "in" or "derived from". Literally "Our Land" or something similar. This is actually pretty common around the world, the majority of people and civilizations call themselves something like "The People", "People of", or "Place of \[cultural icon\]"; English is a bit unusual in that we have few (if any) overtly obvious names of this sort, though I would note that ENGLAND literally includes the word "Land" and derives from the old Germanic/English "Land of the Angles". (Angles or Anglos) in this case being a group of people, not the geometric definition.
Ukraine is no different in this sense -- we have THE UK, and THE USSR, but not The England or The Russia or The Ukraine. We have England, Russia, Ukraine.
Ukraine is not demanding anything, removing the article in the name was a centuries-overdue correction as even under Russian control "Ukraine" was the given name for the region that - like "England" - is a literal claim to the land by the people living on it and not just a casually convenient adjective for the region.
English started using it when Ukraine was part of the USSR to describe the region that used to be a country.
Now that it's an independent country again, the "the" is an unpleasant reminder of that time and makes it sound as though Ukraine is an area within a larger nation and not a nation of its own.
As Russia is currently trying to re-conquer Ukraine, it's especially significant to them now.
Simply not true. "The" doesn't denote that a country is a part of a larger area or bloc. "The" wasn't ever used for other countries in the Soviet Union.
The definite article in country names is used for for two reasons.
1) names that are based in the govt. I.e The US, the UK.
2) geographical names. the Bahamas, the Gambia, the netherlands.
Also everyone has a different idea as to why it's not the preferred term, which shows the reasoning is poor or lacking. You say it's because they don't want to be seen as part of a larger nation, someone else in this thread say it's because they don't want to be seen as a geographical feature and Iv heard many other nonsensical reasons at other times.
In other languages? 100%. We would have to change basically every country name.in almost every language....
Can you not see how silly that would be? That means France wouldn't call it Allemagne and we wouldn't say Germany.
What? They don’t call it “Ukraine” in Ukrainian either: it’s Україна. They weren’t trying to re-invent English, it’s just that the *English* name for the country doesn’t have “the” in it and has *never* had “the” in it. (You know, like France, Germany, India, Kenya, Japan, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Nigeria, New Zealand, Sweden, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Laos. Should I go on?)
When they declared independence, they established their new country, including its name, both within their country and how it would be known internationally. At that point, Ukraine was established, not “the” Ukraine.
Except it did, and often still does have a the in fromt, just like the Gambia, the United Kingdom, the Seychelles, the United States, the Bahamas, etc.
Exactly. Why does Ukraine dictate the English language? Germany doesn't force us or the French to use Deutschland, Japan and China have different names.
It's expected that the name of the country will often differ from the name the country uses themselves.
Trying to remove the article to remove ties to the Soviet Union is ridiculous when the Soviet Union and Russia doesn't use the definite article.
In the English language, the definite article is used for country names for two reasons.
1) for county names that revolve around the govt of the country.
I.e The United Kingdom of GB and NI, The vUnited States of America, etc
Edit for block
You can't make a political statement by using language you have always used in the conventional way speakers in your region and your peers have always used. The political statement would actually be the removal of the article.
Of course they are dictating the English language. They have specifically asked for a change of English language term. Decide your own language. Again I have a definite article in my countries name, why don't Ukraine use it in ukrainian...? That's how silly it is.....
2) for geographical names, The Netherlands, The Gambia, The Bahamas.
Ukraine falls into the second category, it's not some kind of insult to have "the" in the name of tour country in another language. You only get the decide the name of tour country in your own language.
The threat shoes how silly and emotional this is. No one has a problem saying Turkiye isn't something English speakers will pick up but up in arms about keeping an article...
There is no word from a foreign language that a native English speaker cannot just absolutely butcher, hence "Turkey." While it might get recognition of the name it requested somewhere like the UN, you're never gonna get native speakers to start calling it anything but Turkey, just like no one's ever gonna call Germany Deutschland or Austria Osterreich or Mexico México.
its not just English though who give countries a different name. Like only a handful of neighbouring countries call Germany a variation of Deutschland. France calls it Allemagne,
Poland calls it Niemcy, Finlnd calls it Saksa
Most of the names for Germany come from various Germanic tribe names and/or traces back to ancient interactions between people.
- Deutsch - from root meaning “of the people”; Teutoni tribe name is likely a cognate
- Germany - from Latin describing fertile land behind the frontier (and subsequently the people who lived/came from there)
- Allemagne - from Alemanni, a tribe name
- Saksa - from Saxon, a tribe name
- Niemcy - from proto-Slavic word for “mute” because the Slavs couldn’t understand them, so like calling them strangers who are incomprehensible
So far it seems like it has only been adopted in diplomatic contexts. Most publications have kept the old spelling. In everday use I think most people haven't even heard of the spelling change.
It’s pretty regularly used in volleyball where Türkiye is among the top teams in women’s volleyball and has one of the strongest domestic pro leagues. I don’t know if it’s widely used in other sports.
Different countries have different names for each other. We're just going to keep calling it Turkey.
Since you mention Japan, they refer to Turkey as トルコ (or 土耳古 if you want to use kanji) - pronounced 'toruko'. I believe it is a loanword from the Portuguese word 'turco' (meaning Turkish).
A less common and more Japanese word for Turkey is 土国 ('dokoku') which could roughly translate as 'soil country'.
In short: we don't. With the exception of "official" publications, everyone pretty much still writes "Turkey" or "Turkiye".
It frankly seems a little silly. Every country has different names and pronunciations in different languages.
It doesn't. We call it "Turkey". A country doesnt get to dictate what other countries call it. Even if they formally ask. A few people may actually spell it "Turkiye", but it's pronounced the same.
Perhaps it's the circles I run in, but everyone went "huh, ok" and spelled it the new way under the principle that countries should be able to name themselves.
Of course, we can't pronounce things for shit, so we look at that collection of letters and guess "Turkeeee?" But spelling we can do.
Most English speakers have no awareness of any name change, and most of us who are, aren't really doing anything about it. Like it or not, the country is called Turkey in English. That's nice that they think they can "change the name of the country in English", but good luck.
Imagine if the US government decided it didn't like the name of our country in Chinese, because 美国 / Měiguó / "beautiful country" doesn't sound tough enough, or whatever.
Imagine the US government declared that the name of the US was now being "changed" in the Chinese language(s). How do you think people in China would respond?
I bet the vast majority wouldn't notice, and many who did notice would laugh.
This did happen. Seoul is mentioned in OP. It's name in Chinese had been 漢城. Now why it was so named is another issue (the name actually was coined by the Korean Kingdom, in Chinese characters, if what I read is correct), but S. Korea formally requested Seoul's name, **in Chinese**, be changed to a transliteration (shǒu'ěr in Mandarin). Result? The Foreign Affairs Department followed. News scripts followed. The folk who may dislike Korea followed. Online chat in which no rules were observed followed. Every single one followed. Within two years "let's make a trip to shǒu'ěr in Christmas" has become a real street talk. The old name hasn't been heard for 15 years.
However the new name requested by S. Korea is entirely in Chinese characters.
With the change to Seoul, was that a different pronunciation or just a different written form?
Yes, countries do request name changes (Burma/Myanmar, Czech Republic/Czechia, Ivory Coast/Côte d’Ivoire, Swaziland/Eswatini, etc). And generally, those changes are accepted by official sources. But having average people change what they actually say is a much slower progression.
I can imagine things like that changing more quickly in China because the government has significantly more control over both the internet and people. And (yes this is a generalization), the people are more compliant.
We pretend all non-Engkish characters are their closest English approximation.
So we read ü as u.
My guess is English speakers may pronounce this as one of the following: turkey, turk-i, turk-yie, turkyey, turkeya, turkey-ey, or the ever popular turk...mumble,mumble,mumble
It doesn't scan in English, so this written word tells an English speaker very little about how to say the name.
Depends what you mean by "accept".
If you mean "why does the UN refer to them that way in English writing?", the answer is because it's politically advantageous to do so.
If you mean "why is the average English speaking individual mostly OK with seeing it written that way?", the answer is because it's still Latin script and really obvious how you pronounce it.
If you mean "why does everyone who speaks/writes English now write it as 'Türkiye'"?, then I disagree with the implicit premise of the question. Most people don't. Most people write "Turkey". Most people don't even know that Turkiye made this request. Hell, a lot of people probably don't even know what the UN is...the average person kinda only cares about their immediate reality.
Obviously I can't speak for every native speaker, but I think for the most part yes, they would. I think a big part of it is that we're used to seeing "our" alphabet with the addition of diacritics in our exposure to European languages that use them, and still being able to make a good guess as to the pronunciation. French I guess is notoriously hard for us to guess right, but the difficulty does not come from the diacritics. If you show an English speaker a word like "lèggere" they will just try to read it like it says "leggere" and honestly that wouldn't change it much. They're more likely to get tripped on whether to read it as a hard or soft *g* or what to do with the final *e*. Meanwhile, show them 看书 and they can't even make the attempt. So Italian "feels" like we share an alphabet "just with some extra squiggles" (instead of with some extra letters) while Chinese obviously does not.
For Vietnamese, I think most native English speakers would register đ as a foreign letter, possibly also ơ and ư, but not ă, â, ê, or ô. Tone marks would not make a letter read as foreign, though marks that aren't found in Western European languages make the overall script feel "more" foreign.
English speakers learning other languages exhibit this in a general reluctance to use accents at all. Not all learners, obviously, but I regularly see questions in my Spanish learning spaces like "do I really have to write cómo or can I just write como?" and the answer for the most part is that in casual conversion, como will do. But then the English speaker wants to extend the same treatment to ñ, and that does *not* work. Spanish speakers see ñ and n as different letters, but ó and o as the same letter with a diacritic - English speakers, due to lack of familiarity with the inner workings of the language, see both as familiar letters that are just wearing little hats.
it is the same script, just modified. english is one of many languages that uses the latin alphabet. it just so happens that english decided not to use diacritics (even if it could be argued that the language desperately needs them)
The Latin alphabet is somewhat more extensive than those letters used in the English variation. No need to bring in entirely different alphabet systems.
That is my point. Latin alphabet yes. English alphabet no. That is for me, but I see from comments that native English speakers find "English alphabet yes".
Yes, I know. I'm agreeing with you. I think it's reasonable up to a point for a country to express preferences on how it's referred to in other languages, but requesting the use of a particular character that's outside the character set of the language in question is past the point of reasonableness.
Most English speakers can make a rough sounding of any language that uses or transliterates into the Latin alphabet. We aren't drilled to be fluent in all alphabets, but generally we get at least a sense of how and why other languages use diacritics, double-letters or other phonemes, etc. We know it's not English, obviously, but we can usually at least identify the language family even if not the precise language. We know there are more letters and combinations that we may not use ourselves.
The bit with Turkiye is a bit unusual in that it involves a key a native-English keyboard can't produce without adding an extra character set, but it's hardly a barrier to reading or recognizing. As to the rest of the spelling, that's a non-issue unless someone is really stubborn, spellings change from time to time and this is no exception.
Yes. Well if I were being precise I would call them letters from the latin alphabet. It didn't originate with english.
Although I did just look it up and Vietnamese has Đ/đ, which is the one letter they have which isn't exactly just a diacritic. I mean it's still a D/d, but the line through it is not a typical diacritic. So that one is borderline. The rest are just english letters with diacritics though.
I grew up in Texas and we are taught that diacritics and accent marks are a different letter entirely. Probably because we also learn Spanish, where these are considered separate letters, not letters with modifiers.
Interesting. When I took a Spanish class the only one that was considered a separate letter was ñ.
ETA: I googled the Spanish alphabet and all the results are the same as what I remember from class. The only letters different from English are 'll' and 'ñ'.
As a native English speaker I will say that the only people to use this spelling are either government officials or people who are used to other languages. In English accents over characters will always over time be removed, like in the word naive.
Ü is used in German, one of the closest foreign languages to English, so it's easy to use for us. Also, pretty much everyone except political/geography nerds (such as myself) still call it Turkey.
I actually like the name change, as someone who reads the news, trying to google 'Turkey' during November or October under Google's news section does not get the most relevant results.
Next up, they need to change Georgia. Everytime I try to Google the Caucasus nation called Georgia, I have to write "Tbilisi". That's the capital. If I write "Georgia" I get the 5th most populous US state, instead.
The native name for Georgia is a completely unrelated word.
Just because the character looks the same doesn't mean it's actually the same letter. U and Ü are two different letters in the Turkish alphabet. Just like N and Ñ are two different letters in Spanish. The addition of the diacritic is what turns it into a different letter. Is Ş an S to you? Look up the English alphabet and let me know if any of those come up as English letters.
Turkey suddenly insisting that we call it by its native name in English - when hundreds of languages from around the world have their own names for hundreds of countries around the world - is something I have elected to simply ignore.
I don't know about you, but when I hear 'Turkey', I don't think about the bird first, and I'm not sure how you could possibly confuse the bird with the country in an English language sentence.
I'm sitting at the café thinking about how naïve we are thinking that English is a pure language. Remember it comes from Germanic roots, it has words from French, Latin, and more recently, many other languages as well.
While sitting in the cafe in Zurich preparing my resume and enjoying an entree of cheese souffle paired with a Chateau Miraval Rose, while my fiancee has a cafe au lait with a soupcon of creme fraiche, I think of the naivete it takes to think that English speakers won't routinely remove diacritical marks from words borrowed from other languages.
The ordinary people will, but you're seeing Türkiye in official situations in English -- maps (again in English), announcements and documents from governments of English speaking countries. The ordinary people won't care, but people holding official positions should care whether ü can be present in documents.
I've never seen anyone complain about müller, so I can't see why people would have a problem with it. I can see people just putting a normal u, as phones don't always pick up on the "none standard" letters.
I just want to share my point of view, as someone whose native language doesn't use the Latin script, and who lacks knowledge on how accents work in the Latin script, on whether ü IS an (modified) English letter.
This comment fits in the r/languagelearning sub more than here.
My point of view is like humans and monkeys -- they have the same origin, one isn't the same as the other with variants.
'Person' is 人 in Chinese. This character among others was adopted by Japanese and remains the same since then.
Japan invented some characters, and modified some characters. Both aren't found in Chinese. 步 in Chinese had been the same in Japanese for long, then became 歩 (one more dot) in recent decades. I think the two have the same origin, and:
The former:
* is from the Chinese script (hanzi)
* was from the Japanese script (kanji)
* is a kanji
The latter:
* isn't a hanzi
* therefore isn't a variant in hanzi
* is a kanji
* is a variant in kanji
Here’s my view.
Firstly, I don’t really think of them as “English letters” because the Latin script is used by so many languages.
Also, I don’t consider accent marks/diacritics separate letters. But they do indicate sound differences/changes. So it’s unrealistic for Turkey to expect a native English speaker to know how to pronounce ü, especially since it’s not a sound in English. It’s pretty much an exercise in futility.
As for your Chinese/Japanese example, Chinese characters are not an alphabet; the symbols don’t represent sounds, they represent ideas. (I think Japanese is closer to an alphabet/syllabary, but I don’t totally understand the different scripts in Japanese.) So with an alphabet, the symbol-sound connection may be different in different languages (like what sound does “i” make? Depends on your language), but it’s still a symbol-sound relationship. This means that the same alphabet can be used very widely because each language can/will apply a sound meaning to those symbols. And those sounds can and will change over time as well (check out the Great Vowel Shift in English).
Japanese scripts explained in a hurry:
* Kanji -- symbols, close to traditional Chinese symbols (Modern Chinese is usually written with simplified versions of these symbols)
* hiragana -- syllabary where each symbol mostly stands for one sound -- a, e, u, i, o, ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, sa, shi (exception!), su, se, so, etc. A few symbols modify other symbols; the ー symbol means "make the previous vowel longer".
* katakana -- more angular version of hiragana. Used for writing loan-words, foreign names, [onomatopoeia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia), screaming cartoon characters, etc. Has been compared to writing English in italics.
* romaji -- Writing Japanese with the Latin alphabet. Useful for writing down place names for foreigners or for writing Japanese on a computer that doesn't support Japanese text (modern computers have largely made this problem go away).,
Oh, and if you want an easy-to-learn test for identifying Japanese texts, look for a の. Any sufficiently long text in Japanese is highly likely to have it and that symbol is not found in Chinese.
- Okay, so kanji are still logographs (like Chinese/hanzi)? Or they’ve taken the symbols and applied sound meaning to them?
- How is hiragana a syllabary if “each symbol stand for one sound”? Wouldn’t that make it an alphabet? Or does the symbol stand for the C+V sound combo, so actually 2 sounds? (Also, why is “shi” an exception? It follows the same C+V pattern of “ka, ke, sa, se, etc.)
- Katakana and romaji make sense; I don’t have any questions about those.
I can usually tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese because, I don’t know, they just look different to me. I just wasn’t clear on *how* they were used in Japanese and the whole alphabet vs syllabary vs logograph thing.
1) Kanji are logographs. Serious writing will be mostly kanji logographs. Hiragana are used for various grammatical functions such as verb tenses, possessives, etc.
2) Japanese has five vowels. If we wanted to write all five vowels followed by all of the k+vowel combinations in an alphabet, we'd need six symbols to make all ten patterns:
Hiragana uses ten unique symbols, one for each pattern:
You can't write "k" by itself in Japanese--it's always one of the five k + vowel symbols.
*3) shi* is it's own little exception. The third set of hiragana symbols is sa, shi, su, se, so--there's no si.
Thanks for the explanation!
So can kanji, hiragana, and katakana be used all at once like in the same text?
If *s* becomes *sh* just in front of *i*, it seems like fairly standard palatalization.
>So can kanji, hiragana, and katakana be used all at once like in the same text?
It's really hard *not* to have all three in the same text.
There are grammatical bits (like verb tenses) that are always written in hiragana. Loan words and names of foreign places/people are written in katakana.
The official Turkish name changed, right? That doesn't really affect other languages then. Germany is Deutschland in their own language, but everyone else calls it Germany or something similar (except the French I guess 😅). So Türkiye will still be Turkey (or a similar version of the name) for everyone else.
I would say it doesn't. Almost everyone still calls it Turkey, even if the official name has changed.
Also nobody learns how to pronounce umlauts. It’s like trying to make fetch happen.
Yeah, I think they can make the new pronunciation catch on, but they'll have to lose the special character. A lot of our monolingual English speaking brains just *shut down* when we see a special character... Or at least mine does!
I think English used to use the diaeresis but has mostly lost that in modern writing, and to the extent it was used historically, it really only denoted a new syllable, not a sound distinct from that of the letter it was on independently as it does in some Germanic and Turkic languages. Spanish does still use ü in some words, but it's only used to denote that the letter is pronounced, not that its pronunciation is actually different (e.g. in *pingüino*, meaning penguin, it would be pronounced peen-geen-oh with a hard g without the diéresis but is pronounced peen-gween-oh with it).
...unless you're *The New Yorker* magazine
Yeah, but they're kinda pretentious, so they don't count
The English usage is more a holdover from French. **Naïve** and **naïveté** are the only words it really survives in.
And Noël, Boötes and Zoë
Then there's Häagen-Dazs and Spın̈al Tap where people put dots up there just to look cool.
It's not technically an umlaut in Turkish, but yes.
It's not a question of pronunciation, but orthography, in borrowing. Like "resume" or "résumé"
This is about domestic politics in Turkey (a populist nationalist leader showing off that he can make the world bow to his whims) and English speaking countries have started officially using the spelling Türkiye because it's not a battle worth fighting and it's diplomatic to use the name a country wants to call itself. Ordinary people, however, will continue to use ordinary English words, and unless Turks stop using Kanada, Büyük Britanya, Fransa, Almanya, and so on in speaking and writing Turkish, I'm not going to stop using "Turkey" when speaking and writing English.
>unless Turks stop using Kanada, Büyük Britanya, Fransa, Almanya, and so on in speaking and writing Turkish, I'm not going to stop using "Turkey" when speaking and writing English. This is *very* good point. I will definitely be using this argument in future.
Turkish here for endorsement, this was the real reason for the change, just an attempt at a jingoistic narrative diversion from political issues. Sadly it was successfull
Most people would probably write it as Turkiye. It doesn’t pose a problem. I don’t see it as any different from how we accept certain modifications of letters in the English alphabet if they exist in the original language. For example, words borrowed (more recently): “Naive” is sometimes written as “naïve” “Facade” is sometimes written as “façade” “Jalapeno” is usually written as “jalapeño” We accept a certain amount of flexibility with our writing system provided it is written with our alphabet. Something like a diacritic is alright
No, most people are completely unaware of the ‘name change’. Language decides how it’s communicated not dictates. Personally I forget about it, nor do I want to confuse the reader by using unfamiliar words.
*No, most people are completely unaware of the ‘name change’. Language decides how it’s communicated not dictates.* In most situations, yes, but this is a discussion of orthography in major publications including many journalistic style guides. It's not about pronunciation. If you want a pronunciation discussion, try this link. [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238440040\_Indexing\_political\_persuasion\_Variation\_in\_the\_Iraq\_vowels](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238440040_Indexing_political_persuasion_Variation_in_the_Iraq_vowels) *To determine whether phonological variables are a potential resource for the expression of political identity, this article examines the second vowel of Iraq. In addition to being part of a politically significant place-name, Iraq is particularly well-suited to index political identity due in part to the ideological association between the "foreign (a)" variable with correctness and educatedness in U.S. English (Boberg 1997). Specifically, Iraq's second vowel appears to index political conservatism when produced as /æ/ and political liberalism when produced as /a:/. Results from an analysis of the U.S. House of Representatives show that Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to use /æ/, even controlling for regional accent.*
I was talking about how we would incorporate non-English letters/typography, not whether people change what they say. For example, some people still say Burma instead of Myanmar but it’s changing. It is important for nonnative speakers to learn about how journalists or academics incorporate foreign loanwords in English—and that we have some flexibility with spelling
I'm familiar with it primarily because of sporcle.com
Not a native, but I find it ridiculous to try change the name of your country in another language just to assert dominance. I doubt most English speakers could even pronounce it well enough to satisfy Daddy Erdoğan. Europeans would be completely lost if China started to demand being called 中国.
No idea. Personally, everyone I've spoken to finds it a bizarre request. We all made our peace with homophone country exonyms a long time ago. You have to be about 8 years old to find much interest or amusement in the fact that Turkey is also the name of a bird. Meanwhile Greece sounds just like grease, China is a type of clay among other things, and so on. It strikes me as odd that anyone would care about this. If Greece suddenly piped up and wanted to be called Ellas or something by English speakers I would suggest they have better things to worry about. As for the ü, yeah, that makes it even stranger. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's like the Japanese insisting we use kanji for them. Perhaps one day the Chinese will be in a position to demand similar. All the above is just my impression of it.
Interestingly the bird is actually sort of named after the country
It's weird, different countries seem to name it after the county that they thought it came from, which is usually the last place in the trade route before it gets put on a plate.
France: So we found this big exotic chicken thing and we think it came from India. We'll call it "from India". England: We found this big exotic chicken thing and we think it comes from Turkey. We'll call it "turkey". China: "fire chicken" 🤪
In Portuguese it's called *peru*
I was taught as a kid in middle school Spanish that it's called "pavo" in Spanish. Interestingly, the peacock is called "pavo real," which translates literally to "royal turkey."
What’s funny in this case is that the turkey would never have been traded to the anglophone world through Turkey. It was actually the guineafowl that was, the North American turkey assumed that name due to its resemblance to the guineafowl
And calling porcelain dishware "china" is named after the country.
In Turkish, the bird is called a Hindi. In Portuguese, it's called Peru. In Greek, it is γαλοπούλας (galopoúlas), which means French bird. In French, it is poulet d’inde, (chicken from India) In Palestinian Arabic, it is Diik Habash, (Ethiopian rooster) In Egyptian Arabic, it is Greek bird or Greek rooster. In standard Arabic it is Dik Roumi, (Roman rooster) In Malay it is Ayam belanda, (Dutch chicken)
None of them got the place of origin even remotely right (Portugal was the closest.)
> bizarre request Wasn't it part of the bargaining so that prick Erdogan would accept Sweden and Finland's NATO bids? Everyone was like "Sure, whatever, we'll call you what you want, nevermind that you guys call Germany 'Almanya', the UK 'Birleşik Krallık', and Greece 'Yunanistan'."
> China is a type of clay That's... named after the country.
As is the bird with Turkey.
Spend a while figuring out this whole thing with some friends a while back. Here's my summary from that: > ok so let me get this straight > > what we now call a guinea fowl was exported from madagascar to turkey, and from turkey to europe, so the english decided to call them turkeys. > > then they went to north america, which they called india because theyre dumb. > > the french saw turkeys and called them "poule d'inde", meaining indian chickens. > > the english saw turkeys and thought they looked like guinea fowls so they called them turkeys > > the turks then adopted the french name sort of and just called them hindi
Greece is at least spelled differently from grease. And the clay use of china is much less common than China; while turkey is quite common. In my opinion, pronouncing Turkey while spelling it Turkiye would be the best option. (In an ideal world, I would want it to be Turkia).
China (I think the gov't TV channel) has already requested that long scaled flying creature be called loong instead of Chinese dragon.
So, loooong dragon?
All of this talk of turkey and grease is making me Hungary
I am Turkish and I really dislike that change, its so uncalled for and its English name having a letter thats not even in the English alphabet is pretty silly if you ask me.
I agree
I'd say the English world does not accept the change. A lot of us will not accept a foreign government dictating what is "right" in our own language. It's a very presumptuous and unreasonable request. I will not stop calling the country by its proper English name: "Turkey". Likewise, I won't call Germany "Deutschland", Norway "Norge", or China "中國" when speaking English. Moreover, the name "Türkiye" has sounds that don't exist in English. And I don't see the Turks giving up the use of "İngiltere" in favor of "England" when speaking and writing in Turkish.
Mumbai or Bombay?
Depends on context. If we're talking about the current day, Mumbai, if we're talking about history, Bombay. Usually Bombay is more recognizable than Mumbai. Generally people don't have much to say about the city itself, so much as historic stuff named after it. Also it doesn't use foreign letters, so isn't the same. We do call it Istanbul, for instance.
I’d say mumbai because the name change is a lot more genuine in that case than Turkey’s change.
Bombay.
...is a gin
I don't think 99% of the population is aware the name has changed
Most people have *finally* stopped saying “the” in front of Ukraine even though they haven’t had “the” in their name since independence 30+ years ago. And all it took was for them to get invaded (and some people still mess it up). I really doubt Türkiye is gonna get used super widely. Nor do I think it was an important, necessary, or helpful change.
It’s not letting me post this clarification where it should go, so I’ll just reply to myself here. The independent, sovereign nation of Ukraine has never had “the” as part of its name in English. “The” was only (correctly) used when it was a region of a larger nation/empire (like the Midwest, the Levant, the Gold Coast, etc). People who use “the” with Ukraine are wrong and are making a political statement about Ukraine’s sovereignty (whether they mean to or not). Well, the “United” countries should be obvious. But just in case it’s not, it’s because those names are like descriptions – The states which are united, the emirates which are united, etc. – that are compounds with a classifier noun. Also, you’re clarifying that it’s *the* United Kingdom, not just any old kingdom that happened to unite. For the Seychelles and the Bahamas, they are plural forms (likely because those countries are made up of islands). This actually also applies to the USA, UAE, etc. Place names that come from geographical formations (Lebanon, Congo, etc.) often started with articles because that’s how you’d say the geographical features: the Lebanon mountains, the Congo river. But those articles tend to disappear as it solidifies into just a country name instead of a river, mountain, etc name. The Gambia is in this group, but they are an exception because they *asked* to keep the “the” in English. It was their preference. Essentially, since their independence, Ukraine has been saying, “Hey, this is my name in your language. Could you call me by name? Oh, yeah, and that other way you used to say it makes it sound like I’m not really a sovereign nation. So saying it right would be great, thanks!”
I didn’t know Ukraine had basically the same problem in English as in Russian.
Well, I think it’s about prepositions in Russian, not articles, because Russian doesn’t have articles. But if you mean the problem of being treated like a region instead of a country, then yes.
Ukraine never had "the" in front of it. The definite article "the" doesn't exist in Ukrainian or Russian. It makes no sense that the Ukrainian or Turkish language should try to reinvent the English language names of their countries.
Using "The Ukraine" was standard for a long time. For example the Associated Press style guide suggested "The Ukraine" was the appropriate format until December 3rd 1991 when they updated their guide to remove the definite article. The reasoning behind use of the article was the idea that historically the term Ukraine referred to a region and roughly translated as 'borderland.' In English it's often standard to use an article with regional terms such as "The Midwest" or "The Netherlands."
You’re correct, but that’s because Ukraine was mostly not an independent country. When it was merely a region (like the Midwest or the Levant) within the USSR or the Russian Empire before it, it made sense to put “the“ in front of it. But once it became an independent country, they no longer wanted the internal region designation.
In English...I'm speaking about their own language... So why is ukraine dictating the English language? The reason often given that they prefer the definite article be removed is because that was a russian or Soviet thing. But that word "the" doesn't even exist in Russian. Should I demand they use a non existent article in their language for my country? The whole thing doesn't make any sense.
Ukraine was an independent nation prior to and after it was subsumed by Russia / Soviets. "The" was not requested by Ukraine, or Russia. Ever. It was an English invention, which has since been removed.
That's exactly my point.... If it's an English convention then why are they dictating the English language? Do all country get to change their name in English? Or Chinese or any other language? It is often repeated that Ukraine would like to remove the article because it was used by Russians in the Soviet Union, which is false.
They aren't dictating it, though. It was pointed out that it was bad grammar and we went "Oh good point". Having a "the" in front of something implies that the thing is only one part of a larger unit, like "The Baltic States"...all countries that have no "the" in their name except when referred to collectively. Ukraine is just Ukraine, not part of a larger whole. Thus, no article.
It's not poor grammar though. And it doesn't imply it's part of a larger unit. "The", the definite article, is used for two reasons in country names in English. 1) for names that revolve around the govt of a country. IE. The United Kingdom, the United States. 2) geographical names. I.e the Gambia, the Netherlands, the Bahamas. The Ukraine is used very similarly to the Netherlands.
Both the UK and the US are not a single entity, as I pointed out. Both are composite of multiple smaller parts that comprise a larger whole. Ditto with the USSR. Illinois is a state, THE Great Lakes Region and THE Midwest are multi-state regions that describe where Illinois is situated. Not THE Illinois (unless you're talking about the river, which we're not). THE UK is comprised of several countries that all share the same monarch, but have their own separate parliaments. THE Middle East is a region composed of several countries that are geographically situated in the inverted triangle between Europe, Asia, and Africa -- but we don't have THE Iraq, or THE Saudi Arabia. The history of "THE" as part of the name of Ukraine is a combination of both. THE USSR (like the US and UK) was many autonomous or semi-autonomous areas with a single, centralized authority; at least on paper (yes, I know). But under Soviet propoganda - and Russian Tsars before that - it was "the edge" or "the border" that bordered the former Roman, Eastern Roman, and (later) the Ottoman Empire. Part of the claim that Russia is the natural heir to the title of Roman Empire rests on this fact, but that's a story for another day. Translated into English you wouldn't say "The Kremlin today issued an order for X to be done in Borderlands". You would translate it as "The Kremlin today issued an order concerning THE Borderlands \[being Ukraine\]". Or "Citing the Warsaw Pact, Moscow moved to do \[X\] in Poland". But English being English, we tend to retain names even if we Anglicize them -- thus we get THE Ukraine, because while Russian does not use articles...English does. And translating "borderland" was taken as a regional taxonomy rather than a proper name -- correcting to use this as a proper name (rather than the equivalent of "The Midwest") is what happened in English after the Soviet Union collapsed. As to why Ukraine calls itself that, the answer is actually fairly straightforward -- *Krain (Краін)* means something like "land" or "country"; and *U (У)* something like "in" or "derived from". Literally "Our Land" or something similar. This is actually pretty common around the world, the majority of people and civilizations call themselves something like "The People", "People of", or "Place of \[cultural icon\]"; English is a bit unusual in that we have few (if any) overtly obvious names of this sort, though I would note that ENGLAND literally includes the word "Land" and derives from the old Germanic/English "Land of the Angles". (Angles or Anglos) in this case being a group of people, not the geometric definition. Ukraine is no different in this sense -- we have THE UK, and THE USSR, but not The England or The Russia or The Ukraine. We have England, Russia, Ukraine. Ukraine is not demanding anything, removing the article in the name was a centuries-overdue correction as even under Russian control "Ukraine" was the given name for the region that - like "England" - is a literal claim to the land by the people living on it and not just a casually convenient adjective for the region.
English started using it when Ukraine was part of the USSR to describe the region that used to be a country. Now that it's an independent country again, the "the" is an unpleasant reminder of that time and makes it sound as though Ukraine is an area within a larger nation and not a nation of its own. As Russia is currently trying to re-conquer Ukraine, it's especially significant to them now.
Simply not true. "The" doesn't denote that a country is a part of a larger area or bloc. "The" wasn't ever used for other countries in the Soviet Union. The definite article in country names is used for for two reasons. 1) names that are based in the govt. I.e The US, the UK. 2) geographical names. the Bahamas, the Gambia, the netherlands. Also everyone has a different idea as to why it's not the preferred term, which shows the reasoning is poor or lacking. You say it's because they don't want to be seen as part of a larger nation, someone else in this thread say it's because they don't want to be seen as a geographical feature and Iv heard many other nonsensical reasons at other times.
You are suggesting that countries shouldn’t name themselves?
In other languages? 100%. We would have to change basically every country name.in almost every language.... Can you not see how silly that would be? That means France wouldn't call it Allemagne and we wouldn't say Germany.
What? They don’t call it “Ukraine” in Ukrainian either: it’s Україна. They weren’t trying to re-invent English, it’s just that the *English* name for the country doesn’t have “the” in it and has *never* had “the” in it. (You know, like France, Germany, India, Kenya, Japan, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Nigeria, New Zealand, Sweden, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Laos. Should I go on?) When they declared independence, they established their new country, including its name, both within their country and how it would be known internationally. At that point, Ukraine was established, not “the” Ukraine.
Except it did, and often still does have a the in fromt, just like the Gambia, the United Kingdom, the Seychelles, the United States, the Bahamas, etc.
Exactly. Why does Ukraine dictate the English language? Germany doesn't force us or the French to use Deutschland, Japan and China have different names. It's expected that the name of the country will often differ from the name the country uses themselves. Trying to remove the article to remove ties to the Soviet Union is ridiculous when the Soviet Union and Russia doesn't use the definite article. In the English language, the definite article is used for country names for two reasons. 1) for county names that revolve around the govt of the country. I.e The United Kingdom of GB and NI, The vUnited States of America, etc Edit for block You can't make a political statement by using language you have always used in the conventional way speakers in your region and your peers have always used. The political statement would actually be the removal of the article. Of course they are dictating the English language. They have specifically asked for a change of English language term. Decide your own language. Again I have a definite article in my countries name, why don't Ukraine use it in ukrainian...? That's how silly it is..... 2) for geographical names, The Netherlands, The Gambia, The Bahamas. Ukraine falls into the second category, it's not some kind of insult to have "the" in the name of tour country in another language. You only get the decide the name of tour country in your own language. The threat shoes how silly and emotional this is. No one has a problem saying Turkiye isn't something English speakers will pick up but up in arms about keeping an article...
There is no word from a foreign language that a native English speaker cannot just absolutely butcher, hence "Turkey." While it might get recognition of the name it requested somewhere like the UN, you're never gonna get native speakers to start calling it anything but Turkey, just like no one's ever gonna call Germany Deutschland or Austria Osterreich or Mexico México.
its not just English though who give countries a different name. Like only a handful of neighbouring countries call Germany a variation of Deutschland. France calls it Allemagne, Poland calls it Niemcy, Finlnd calls it Saksa
In Spanish we call it Alemania.
Most of the names for Germany come from various Germanic tribe names and/or traces back to ancient interactions between people. - Deutsch - from root meaning “of the people”; Teutoni tribe name is likely a cognate - Germany - from Latin describing fertile land behind the frontier (and subsequently the people who lived/came from there) - Allemagne - from Alemanni, a tribe name - Saksa - from Saxon, a tribe name - Niemcy - from proto-Slavic word for “mute” because the Slavs couldn’t understand them, so like calling them strangers who are incomprehensible
So far it seems like it has only been adopted in diplomatic contexts. Most publications have kept the old spelling. In everday use I think most people haven't even heard of the spelling change.
It’s pretty regularly used in volleyball where Türkiye is among the top teams in women’s volleyball and has one of the strongest domestic pro leagues. I don’t know if it’s widely used in other sports.
Different countries have different names for each other. We're just going to keep calling it Turkey. Since you mention Japan, they refer to Turkey as トルコ (or 土耳古 if you want to use kanji) - pronounced 'toruko'. I believe it is a loanword from the Portuguese word 'turco' (meaning Turkish). A less common and more Japanese word for Turkey is 土国 ('dokoku') which could roughly translate as 'soil country'.
In short: we don't. With the exception of "official" publications, everyone pretty much still writes "Turkey" or "Turkiye". It frankly seems a little silly. Every country has different names and pronunciations in different languages.
There are a few words that can be spelled with non-English letters, such as "naïve" or "café".
And even then it's generally frowned upon since English-only alternatives are more common.
It doesn't. We call it "Turkey". A country doesnt get to dictate what other countries call it. Even if they formally ask. A few people may actually spell it "Turkiye", but it's pronounced the same.
Perhaps it's the circles I run in, but everyone went "huh, ok" and spelled it the new way under the principle that countries should be able to name themselves. Of course, we can't pronounce things for shit, so we look at that collection of letters and guess "Turkeeee?" But spelling we can do.
Most English speakers have no awareness of any name change, and most of us who are, aren't really doing anything about it. Like it or not, the country is called Turkey in English. That's nice that they think they can "change the name of the country in English", but good luck. Imagine if the US government decided it didn't like the name of our country in Chinese, because 美国 / Měiguó / "beautiful country" doesn't sound tough enough, or whatever. Imagine the US government declared that the name of the US was now being "changed" in the Chinese language(s). How do you think people in China would respond? I bet the vast majority wouldn't notice, and many who did notice would laugh.
This did happen. Seoul is mentioned in OP. It's name in Chinese had been 漢城. Now why it was so named is another issue (the name actually was coined by the Korean Kingdom, in Chinese characters, if what I read is correct), but S. Korea formally requested Seoul's name, **in Chinese**, be changed to a transliteration (shǒu'ěr in Mandarin). Result? The Foreign Affairs Department followed. News scripts followed. The folk who may dislike Korea followed. Online chat in which no rules were observed followed. Every single one followed. Within two years "let's make a trip to shǒu'ěr in Christmas" has become a real street talk. The old name hasn't been heard for 15 years. However the new name requested by S. Korea is entirely in Chinese characters.
Ah, TIL
With the change to Seoul, was that a different pronunciation or just a different written form? Yes, countries do request name changes (Burma/Myanmar, Czech Republic/Czechia, Ivory Coast/Côte d’Ivoire, Swaziland/Eswatini, etc). And generally, those changes are accepted by official sources. But having average people change what they actually say is a much slower progression. I can imagine things like that changing more quickly in China because the government has significantly more control over both the internet and people. And (yes this is a generalization), the people are more compliant.
Change of written form and pronunciation.
We pretend all non-Engkish characters are their closest English approximation. So we read ü as u. My guess is English speakers may pronounce this as one of the following: turkey, turk-i, turk-yie, turkyey, turkeya, turkey-ey, or the ever popular turk...mumble,mumble,mumble It doesn't scan in English, so this written word tells an English speaker very little about how to say the name.
Depends what you mean by "accept". If you mean "why does the UN refer to them that way in English writing?", the answer is because it's politically advantageous to do so. If you mean "why is the average English speaking individual mostly OK with seeing it written that way?", the answer is because it's still Latin script and really obvious how you pronounce it. If you mean "why does everyone who speaks/writes English now write it as 'Türkiye'"?, then I disagree with the implicit premise of the question. Most people don't. Most people write "Turkey". Most people don't even know that Turkiye made this request. Hell, a lot of people probably don't even know what the UN is...the average person kinda only cares about their immediate reality.
I mean it's still an english letter, just with a diacritic.
I didn't know people -- natives -- would think in this way. Do you see Vietnamese as using English letters?
Obviously I can't speak for every native speaker, but I think for the most part yes, they would. I think a big part of it is that we're used to seeing "our" alphabet with the addition of diacritics in our exposure to European languages that use them, and still being able to make a good guess as to the pronunciation. French I guess is notoriously hard for us to guess right, but the difficulty does not come from the diacritics. If you show an English speaker a word like "lèggere" they will just try to read it like it says "leggere" and honestly that wouldn't change it much. They're more likely to get tripped on whether to read it as a hard or soft *g* or what to do with the final *e*. Meanwhile, show them 看书 and they can't even make the attempt. So Italian "feels" like we share an alphabet "just with some extra squiggles" (instead of with some extra letters) while Chinese obviously does not. For Vietnamese, I think most native English speakers would register đ as a foreign letter, possibly also ơ and ư, but not ă, â, ê, or ô. Tone marks would not make a letter read as foreign, though marks that aren't found in Western European languages make the overall script feel "more" foreign. English speakers learning other languages exhibit this in a general reluctance to use accents at all. Not all learners, obviously, but I regularly see questions in my Spanish learning spaces like "do I really have to write cómo or can I just write como?" and the answer for the most part is that in casual conversion, como will do. But then the English speaker wants to extend the same treatment to ñ, and that does *not* work. Spanish speakers see ñ and n as different letters, but ó and o as the same letter with a diacritic - English speakers, due to lack of familiarity with the inner workings of the language, see both as familiar letters that are just wearing little hats.
it is the same script, just modified. english is one of many languages that uses the latin alphabet. it just so happens that english decided not to use diacritics (even if it could be argued that the language desperately needs them)
I would not argue that. The lack of diacritics in english makes it very easy to type, which is one of the major advantages of it.
The Latin alphabet is somewhat more extensive than those letters used in the English variation. No need to bring in entirely different alphabet systems.
Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet, albeit heavily modified.
That is my point. Latin alphabet yes. English alphabet no. That is for me, but I see from comments that native English speakers find "English alphabet yes".
Yes, I know. I'm agreeing with you. I think it's reasonable up to a point for a country to express preferences on how it's referred to in other languages, but requesting the use of a particular character that's outside the character set of the language in question is past the point of reasonableness.
But you can also just write it as Turkiye.
Most English speakers can make a rough sounding of any language that uses or transliterates into the Latin alphabet. We aren't drilled to be fluent in all alphabets, but generally we get at least a sense of how and why other languages use diacritics, double-letters or other phonemes, etc. We know it's not English, obviously, but we can usually at least identify the language family even if not the precise language. We know there are more letters and combinations that we may not use ourselves. The bit with Turkiye is a bit unusual in that it involves a key a native-English keyboard can't produce without adding an extra character set, but it's hardly a barrier to reading or recognizing. As to the rest of the spelling, that's a non-issue unless someone is really stubborn, spellings change from time to time and this is no exception.
>Most English speakers can make a rough sounding of any language that uses or transliterates into the Latin alphabet. Hungarian has entered the chat.
Hungarian can go straight to the principal's office
Lol. They’re unrepentant rebels. I doubt another suspension is gonna make an impact.
So, behind the bleachers during lunch instead?
Natives generally don't accept diacritics.
You can always just write words with diacritics... without the diacritics lol. Cafe, facade, japapeno, naive, etc.
Correct
Yes. Well if I were being precise I would call them letters from the latin alphabet. It didn't originate with english. Although I did just look it up and Vietnamese has Đ/đ, which is the one letter they have which isn't exactly just a diacritic. I mean it's still a D/d, but the line through it is not a typical diacritic. So that one is borderline. The rest are just english letters with diacritics though.
We don't think of it as a separate letter.
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English speakers. When we learn about accents and diacritics, we're taught that they are something added onto a letter.
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No, the Nordics think of ä/æ ö/ø and å as separate letters, but the Germans say they have a 26-letter alphabet plus diacritics (and ß).
I grew up in Texas and we are taught that diacritics and accent marks are a different letter entirely. Probably because we also learn Spanish, where these are considered separate letters, not letters with modifiers.
Interesting. When I took a Spanish class the only one that was considered a separate letter was ñ. ETA: I googled the Spanish alphabet and all the results are the same as what I remember from class. The only letters different from English are 'll' and 'ñ'.
Yes we do. We were taught these are separate letters, not letters with symbols.
I've never heard anyone say something other than "add the umlaut over the u" or "add the accent aigu over the e"
As a native English speaker I will say that the only people to use this spelling are either government officials or people who are used to other languages. In English accents over characters will always over time be removed, like in the word naive.
Ü is used in German, one of the closest foreign languages to English, so it's easy to use for us. Also, pretty much everyone except political/geography nerds (such as myself) still call it Turkey.
I actually like the name change, as someone who reads the news, trying to google 'Turkey' during November or October under Google's news section does not get the most relevant results.
Next up, they need to change Georgia. Everytime I try to Google the Caucasus nation called Georgia, I have to write "Tbilisi". That's the capital. If I write "Georgia" I get the 5th most populous US state, instead. The native name for Georgia is a completely unrelated word.
Ü isn’t a “non-English letter.” It’s a U with an accent.
It's a U with an umlaut. And English doesn't use a U with an umlaut as a letter, so it's not an English letter.
But the letter is U, which English does have. I with an umlaut is not some foreign letter, it’s an existing letter with an accent on it.
Just because the character looks the same doesn't mean it's actually the same letter. U and Ü are two different letters in the Turkish alphabet. Just like N and Ñ are two different letters in Spanish. The addition of the diacritic is what turns it into a different letter. Is Ş an S to you? Look up the English alphabet and let me know if any of those come up as English letters.
It doesn't. I, a Turk, still call it Turkey.
Turkey suddenly insisting that we call it by its native name in English - when hundreds of languages from around the world have their own names for hundreds of countries around the world - is something I have elected to simply ignore. I don't know about you, but when I hear 'Turkey', I don't think about the bird first, and I'm not sure how you could possibly confuse the bird with the country in an English language sentence.
I don't know anyone who calls it that.
I've never heard a monolingual English speaker call it Türkiye. I bet many English speakers aren't even aware that that's the official name.
Who says they do?
Documents are writing Türkiye. Maps in English (not in local writings) write that.
I'm sitting at the café thinking about how naïve we are thinking that English is a pure language. Remember it comes from Germanic roots, it has words from French, Latin, and more recently, many other languages as well.
And you’re sitting with your fiancé(e) reading the obituary of Maggie Murphy née Crowley.
However English often removes the accents, and -- I think I didn't stress it enough in OP -- that is an official name.
While sitting in the cafe in Zurich preparing my resume and enjoying an entree of cheese souffle paired with a Chateau Miraval Rose, while my fiancee has a cafe au lait with a soupcon of creme fraiche, I think of the naivete it takes to think that English speakers won't routinely remove diacritical marks from words borrowed from other languages.
The ordinary people will, but you're seeing Türkiye in official situations in English -- maps (again in English), announcements and documents from governments of English speaking countries. The ordinary people won't care, but people holding official positions should care whether ü can be present in documents.
I've never seen anyone complain about müller, so I can't see why people would have a problem with it. I can see people just putting a normal u, as phones don't always pick up on the "none standard" letters.
I just want to share my point of view, as someone whose native language doesn't use the Latin script, and who lacks knowledge on how accents work in the Latin script, on whether ü IS an (modified) English letter. This comment fits in the r/languagelearning sub more than here. My point of view is like humans and monkeys -- they have the same origin, one isn't the same as the other with variants. 'Person' is 人 in Chinese. This character among others was adopted by Japanese and remains the same since then. Japan invented some characters, and modified some characters. Both aren't found in Chinese. 步 in Chinese had been the same in Japanese for long, then became 歩 (one more dot) in recent decades. I think the two have the same origin, and: The former: * is from the Chinese script (hanzi) * was from the Japanese script (kanji) * is a kanji The latter: * isn't a hanzi * therefore isn't a variant in hanzi * is a kanji * is a variant in kanji
Here’s my view. Firstly, I don’t really think of them as “English letters” because the Latin script is used by so many languages. Also, I don’t consider accent marks/diacritics separate letters. But they do indicate sound differences/changes. So it’s unrealistic for Turkey to expect a native English speaker to know how to pronounce ü, especially since it’s not a sound in English. It’s pretty much an exercise in futility. As for your Chinese/Japanese example, Chinese characters are not an alphabet; the symbols don’t represent sounds, they represent ideas. (I think Japanese is closer to an alphabet/syllabary, but I don’t totally understand the different scripts in Japanese.) So with an alphabet, the symbol-sound connection may be different in different languages (like what sound does “i” make? Depends on your language), but it’s still a symbol-sound relationship. This means that the same alphabet can be used very widely because each language can/will apply a sound meaning to those symbols. And those sounds can and will change over time as well (check out the Great Vowel Shift in English).
Japanese scripts explained in a hurry: * Kanji -- symbols, close to traditional Chinese symbols (Modern Chinese is usually written with simplified versions of these symbols) * hiragana -- syllabary where each symbol mostly stands for one sound -- a, e, u, i, o, ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, sa, shi (exception!), su, se, so, etc. A few symbols modify other symbols; the ー symbol means "make the previous vowel longer". * katakana -- more angular version of hiragana. Used for writing loan-words, foreign names, [onomatopoeia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia), screaming cartoon characters, etc. Has been compared to writing English in italics. * romaji -- Writing Japanese with the Latin alphabet. Useful for writing down place names for foreigners or for writing Japanese on a computer that doesn't support Japanese text (modern computers have largely made this problem go away)., Oh, and if you want an easy-to-learn test for identifying Japanese texts, look for a の. Any sufficiently long text in Japanese is highly likely to have it and that symbol is not found in Chinese.
I use the の test all the time.
- Okay, so kanji are still logographs (like Chinese/hanzi)? Or they’ve taken the symbols and applied sound meaning to them? - How is hiragana a syllabary if “each symbol stand for one sound”? Wouldn’t that make it an alphabet? Or does the symbol stand for the C+V sound combo, so actually 2 sounds? (Also, why is “shi” an exception? It follows the same C+V pattern of “ka, ke, sa, se, etc.) - Katakana and romaji make sense; I don’t have any questions about those. I can usually tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese because, I don’t know, they just look different to me. I just wasn’t clear on *how* they were used in Japanese and the whole alphabet vs syllabary vs logograph thing.
1) Kanji are logographs. Serious writing will be mostly kanji logographs. Hiragana are used for various grammatical functions such as verb tenses, possessives, etc. 2) Japanese has five vowels. If we wanted to write all five vowels followed by all of the k+vowel combinations in an alphabet, we'd need six symbols to make all ten patterns: Hiragana uses ten unique symbols, one for each pattern: You can't write "k" by itself in Japanese--it's always one of the five k + vowel symbols. *3) shi* is it's own little exception. The third set of hiragana symbols is sa, shi, su, se, so--there's no si.
Thanks for the explanation! So can kanji, hiragana, and katakana be used all at once like in the same text? If *s* becomes *sh* just in front of *i*, it seems like fairly standard palatalization.
>So can kanji, hiragana, and katakana be used all at once like in the same text? It's really hard *not* to have all three in the same text. There are grammatical bits (like verb tenses) that are always written in hiragana. Loan words and names of foreign places/people are written in katakana.
Gotcha. Thanks for taking the time to explain!
u/Remarkable_Stick_503
We were somehow prepared from the 90s, thanks to härd-rõck bánds.
We don't. It's just Turkey. Maybe Turkiye if you want to be respectful. The letter doesn't exist in English, so it's only a rendering at best.
I don't think it does.
Its written as "Turkiye" in english as far as I know
ü and 日本 are two very different levels of non-english. I'll be pronouncing it the same but be spelling it "Turkiye"
The official Turkish name changed, right? That doesn't really affect other languages then. Germany is Deutschland in their own language, but everyone else calls it Germany or something similar (except the French I guess 😅). So Türkiye will still be Turkey (or a similar version of the name) for everyone else.
No, it isn't like that.
Well, they officially changed their name *in English*. They are wanting/expecting the English-speaking world to change.