We should know. Germany. Japan, Korea. Cuba.
I imagine they’ll get their ‘come-uppance’ when not looking for their inhuman treatment towards ‘neighbors’
Russian state media is currently blaming… am I reading this right… Halo and Destiny developer Bungie for the recent drama in Kazakhstan.
(SCMP reprint)
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks!
Though there may be some unsavory kinds of nationalism behind this particular step, overall I support this. We need to reject the laughable, and often racist, historic imperialist interpretations of place names and call the places by their correct names.
“Türkiye” is barely even a new name
It’s more like a different spelling
Well, it is a very different pronunciation, which I think is the point.
More fun would be Deutschland declaring that its official name in all languages is now Deutschland, not “Germany”, or “Allemagne”, or “Alemaña”, or “Γερμανία”, or “Герма́ния”, or “Німе́ччина”, or “德國”, or “ドイツ”, and whether it’s even possible to pronounce it in those languages is Not Their Problem: any other word than Deutschland will not be recognised as a name of the country.
This isn’t like Ayre’s Rock having the name Uluru restored to it, or talking about Sámi instead of “Lapps”, or Inuit instead of “Eskimo”, or even Istanbul instead of Constantinople.
“Turkey” is how anglophones refer to the country. And Turkey can certainly change its branding in English (which is what this is), but it’s not necessarily an insult to use a language’s native pronunciation of a placename instead of trying to use the pronunciation of the people who live there. Because if that latter were required, then most English speakers wanting to talk about Paris or Budapest or Moscow or Beijing would need remedial linguistics lessons just to make the sounds.
The other examples there, Holland, North Macedonia, and Czechia, are all different cases:
Holland was never the name of the whole country, it is the name of a couple of regions (North and South Holland). Calling all of the Netherlands “Holland” is like calling all of the United States “Carolina”. (That is, it’s not a pronunciation issue, or a variant name, it’s always been just wrong.)
North Macedonia is an improvement from FYROM, “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”, and thanks to Greece fighting tooth and nail that “Macedonia” is the name of one of their provinces dammit, and those Slavs to the north can’t have the name, “North Macedonia” is probably as good as they’re going to get.
And Czechia isn’t replacing Czech Republic, it’s in addition to it as a shorter form. Also they probably wanted a country name after their ethnonym, Češi, rather than the old name Bohemia, which was based on the Gallic tribe who lived there when the Roman Empire was going through the place.
Also: it’s Erdoǧan: there are definitely all kinds of unsavory nationalism behind this, because that’s what Erdoǧan does.
It was for a couple of years.
would bring in way more tourists though
Point.
Still, that’s more like an emperor conquering the United States, and setting up his cousin as King, which he renames to the Kingdom of Carolina because he set up his capitol in Raleigh.
We do see a lot of official name changes for cities these days (Busan was once Pusan, Beijing was once Peking and Mumbai was once Bombay), and the new official spellings and pronunciations have more or less caught on (although there is an unfortunate tendency to pronounce the J in Beijing the same way as the letter J is pronounced in French even though the English pronunciation of the letter J is much closer to how it is actually pronounced).
