Originally published at: Turkey to change official name to Türkiye in hopes of ending association with hapless yet delicious bird | Boing Boing
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Good for them. We need more umlauts.
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I’ve always been confused why we have our own names for countries. Why aren’t they all called what they call themselves?
It’s like someone says " My name is Hans." And we just say… " We will call you Hank."
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This should excite the editors at The New Yorker
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That’s fine but they still have a small town called Batman. They going to change that too?
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But . . . we literally do stuff like that all the time. Ramon Estevez becomes Martin Sheen, Carlos Estevez becomes Charlie Sheen. Issur Danielovitch becomes Kirk Douglas. Hell, my last name is McGough, which still is hard to spell and pronounce, but apparently was originally Maceochaidh. I’ve had my nails done at a salon where most of the employees were immigrants from Vietnam, and you can see their real names on their licenses on the wall, but they all go by Mary, Jenny, Julie, etc. because most of their clients can’t be bothered to spend a minute learning how to say their names.
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Nah. Nah! Nah, nah, nah nananana…
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Turkeyer? As in “even more like a Turkey?”
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I’m fine with that change. I do reserve the right to keep calling Erdogan by his more appropriate name, “that thin-skinned nationalist tinpot dictator”.
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In Spanish the country is known as Turkia, while the bird we have for thanksgiving in Spanish is Pavo. So for it’s a non-issue for Hispanic countries, that said if the people of Turkey, or Turkiye, want to change the name to better represent themselves cool but this is Erdogan we’re talking about here. The move is similar to Hugo Chavez, who entrenched himself into the politics of Venezuela by renaming the country, slightly changing the flag, and taking control of the historical narrative of the country. Even went as far as exhuming the body of Simon Bolivar (Venezuela’s version of George Washington).
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Yeah, worry about the name … not the fool running the place that doesn’t understand banking or economics.
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I thought it had more to do with writing them in a way that people say them the way residents of other countries expect. There are a lot of languages in the world, and to me it’s interesting to note how many different ways the same sounds can be spelled or written. 
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Now the country sounds like it’s named after the bird.
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Erdoganker
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Because Europeans believed that non-Europeans had no real history or if they did, they were well past relevancy as Europeans were now the primary historical actors in the world, and therefore they could impose whatever names (and other things) they wanted on the rest of the world… It’s the same reason so many people around the world speak English and French…
TLDR: Colonialism.
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I’m not sure about Hans, but I’d rather an English speaker to address me just by my initial (G) than to butcher my Portuguese name trying to say it. One may use the English version, William or Bill, if they prefer.
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That guy that had a party at Hastings back when, his name rightfully starts with “G,” but he gets called William anyway.
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Wait a minute! That’s exactly how a turkey would spell it!
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Growing up collecting stamps, I got to learn a lot of the names of countries used within that country.
I don’t think I had any Turkish stamps, though.
ETA - I remember Hungary was Magyar.
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