There are tons of common words in English that use non English characters. No one argues those words need to be changed so I'm not sure why so many people here are so gungho about it.
Yes, beginning in 2022 the government of the Republic of Turkey asked people to use "Türkiye" in English rather than the traditional spelling, "Turkey," which dates back to the 18th century in English or possibly earlier. Yes, "Türkiye" is used in diplomatic contexts in English because that's what Turkey's government requests. However, it's hard to argue that it's a real English name given the orthography is obnoxiously foreign. There are two letters present that are not normally used in English orthography. The obvious one is Ü/ü, which is used here as a different vowel rather than the usual (but rare) usage in English to indicate that two vowels next to each other are NOT a diphthong. The less obvious but more troublesome letter is the dotted I, İ/i. It is ONLY used in English to write "Türkiye," inflicting the dotted/dotless I problem on anyone who writes "Türkiye" or "TÜRKİYE" regardless of the language.
I had a hard time trying to understand what my kid is doing there. The “games” were weird. I have an impression that it was very highly addictive. So it’s gone from my home.
My nephews were into it. I tried to play with them and there were not a ton of real games. Some fun like driving maps people had made just to crash and jump ramps, some shooting gallery things. The thing that concerned me was the amount of games that were obvious gambling type stimulation. Games where you do nothing but collect coins or points to get a shot at a pet or piece of loot, but then block access after a few free hits with a timed wall that could be removed for robux.
The other thing that concerned me was the amount of adults there just to 'play' i joined a shooting 'game' (just a bunch of stuff to shoot and guns laying around) and there was voice chat included and some guy with an eastern european accent making homophobic jokes and talking about how someone should add lazy mexicans as targets. Not uncommon online, but roblox I had at one time thought was trying to be a childrens platform, boy was I wrong.
I let my SIL know she might want to keep them off that or be present whenever they play. She did not listen until one of my nephews stole her credit card and used it to buy a bunch of crap online.
Just like every other part of life, I'll generally call people what they ask to be called. Türkiye has requested internationally to be known under this name.
Funny you mentioned the Czech Republic: there is a concerted effort by their hockey federation to be called Czechia and we’re getting blasted with it by Bell Media in Canada for the past few years
I wonder if this this region/language dependent. Because I remember that in russian, they’ve been called “Czechia” since at least when Czechoslovakia got broken up, but in english it still seems to be squarely referred to as “Czech Republic”.
One doesn't get to dictate how their name gets rendered in a foreign language. The government of Turkey can feel free to ask, but the collective answer from the English speaking world should be "no".
I disagree. Again, if the German government demanded everybody call Germany "Deutschland", I'd say "we've been calling Germany 'Germany' for hundreds of years. The English word for Deutschland is 'Germany'. People are entitled to use the language they like, nobody is stopping you promoting 'Deutschland' and seeing if that takes off." It is not analogous with an individual person's name.
Updating everything, teaching everyone, no benefit to English speakers besides being nice. What happens next year if they wanna switch it back? And then the year after that if it changes again?
How many countries go through some sort of rebrand in a year? Who gets respected and who doesn't? Why?
Just like corporations aren’t people, countries aren’t people! And yes, I will keep using Bombay since I don’t kowtow to Hindu nationalists:
“Shiv Sena, the Hindu nationalist party in power in Bombay, decided to change the city's name to Mumbai”
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Shouldn't that be surprising? Christianity has the same rules around pornography so predominantly Christian countries would block it for the same reason.
Or perhaps there are no predominantly Christian countries anymore.
"Separation of church and state" is a metaphor paraphrased from Thomas Jefferson and used by others in discussions of the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".
> Sexual exploitation concerns
> Promotion of homosexuality
> Incentives for children through virtual currency
The official also highlighted issues with “robux,” Roblox’s virtual currency. Reports indicated that bot accounts were distributing robux to incentivize children’s participation in the aforementioned problematic activities.
Challenges in content oversight
> The inability to effectively monitor and regulate inappropriate content on Roblox
The homosexuality part is kind of absurd, but very in line with other Türkiye policies.
For the rest they seem very reasonable. Predatory monetization methods in games for adults are bad, applying the same methods to children is pure evil.
I will prefer strong regulations than banning. The same the we do with gambling.
I don't really see the homosexuality part as absurd. It is to be expected in their less tolerant culture. Remember, Turkey is the only majority Muslim country in the world where homosexuality is legal. They're pretty tolerant comparatively, but their culture is such that they don't want to encourage it. I wouldn't want to live in their society but I do believe in national self determination.
It seems that there is a persistent desire to call the country whatever you are used to. As a Turkish, I would add the points: You can call it whatever you want. Turkey is the historical name of the region. I believe the bird's name was also adopted from the fact that the bird came to Western world through Turkiye. The bird comes to us from India, so we call it "Hindi" in Turkish. I hope India one day does not change its name to something else because they don't want to be associated with what other people call them. Oh wait, they call themselves as Bharat(a) actually. In Turkish, the word "spice" is called "Baharat". Go figure.
Another important point for people who want to dead name Turkiye is this: When South Sudan was separate from Sudan, they were called South Sudan. Nobody disputed their name. If Turkiye split in two one day, one might call itself "Eastern Turkiye". In that case I just hope nobody tells them, 'no I will call you "Eastern Turkey" because that's what the other country was called which you were part of before.' We are not called "Ottoman Kingdom 2.0" for some reason. Now we apparently chose ourselves a new name to be referred in foreign languages. They did not consult me, tbh. But it fits what we call it in our original language (we call it "Türkiye"), so I am actually happy about it. So if you show respect to that decision then you show that as it is. If you don't respect it then, well you don't, and that's that. No kebap for you (/s).
About Roblox: My nephew coming of age invited me to play computer games. He told me to install Roblox but I haven't even heard about it and it did not appeal to me. I told him to install Sven-Co-op, because Half-Life is awesome and Sven Co-Op gives you multiplayer feature for free. We played for a while but he was dead bored and he quit. I was genuinely hurt but did not show it. New generation likes other things I guess. Then we played Roblox and honestly it had worse graphics than Half-Life, which is 25 years old game. Somehow it was boring to me but enjoyable to my Gen Z nephew. Well I hope he won't get too hardly shaken by the news, anyhow, somehow I feel relieved about this ban. These days he talks about "making his own games". I want to wait until a bit before I tell him the bad news about making games, but in general I am happy about the direction he is thinking.
> These days he talks about "making his own games". I want to wait until a bit before I tell him the bad news about making games
Part of the appeal of Roblox, to my limited understanding, is the ability to create content ("games") for it. This is the platform's two-edged sword, though, since their content moderation seems either insufficient or otherwise lacking for my tastes.
It's kind of the same problem with reddit: there is good content there, but there's also some of the worst things imaginable outside of *chan or *leaks. I pay a lot of attention when I notice any of my teenage kids are looking at any subreddit.
or, you just accept that different countries use different names for other countries.
Nobody calls Germany "Deutschland" outside of Germany (okay, outside of German-speaking countries)
Nobody calls Japan "Nihon" except people in Japan
Nobody calls Finland "Suomi" except people living there
...and the same goes for cities.
People probably still call it Turkey because they know how to pronounce it. Both the "ü" and the "iy" are very uncommon (and thus hard to pronounce) sounds for most of the world.
But that's the point: the name hasn't actually changed. It has always been called "Türkiye" by the people living there. What has changed is that they now want everyone else to call them by that name...
> Côte d’Ivoire
Nobody except french speaking countries call it that. It's called "Ivory Coast" in English, for example
Yes, they want that; why not do that then? Like with Czechia[1], Sri Lanka, the Netherlands and others?
Côte d’Ivoire is indeed also known as "Ivory Coast"; still, you can write a sentence in English with "Côte d’Ivoire" and it doesn't raise an eyebrow[2]. If that's not enough, there's Curaçao too.
A substantial part of the US population isn't going to know where the Ivory coast is, even less so if you call it Côte d’Ivoire, or why you're saying it in French.
Would they be better with a different country though? To be fair, a substantial part of the US population couldn’t point Iran or Ukraine[1] on the map.
We say the Netherlands not Holland, Sri Lanka not Ceylon, Czechia is getting more popular[1] and sometimes replaces Czech Republic; Türkiye would not be the first country to have its English name altered.
In English we already have naïve, coöperate, reëlect as perfectly acceptable, if somewhat old-fashioned spellings. So I'd argue the look at least of Türkiye [1] is not as foreign as the two examples you gave :)
[1] Admittedly the diacritic is an umlaut not diaeresis, but I take your point to be about the (supposedly) foreign appearance of Türkiye.
94 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadAnyways do you have a résumé, fiancée, or fiancé? Do you visit the café often? haha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I_in_comput...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey
The other thing that concerned me was the amount of adults there just to 'play' i joined a shooting 'game' (just a bunch of stuff to shoot and guns laying around) and there was voice chat included and some guy with an eastern european accent making homophobic jokes and talking about how someone should add lazy mexicans as targets. Not uncommon online, but roblox I had at one time thought was trying to be a childrens platform, boy was I wrong.
I let my SIL know she might want to keep them off that or be present whenever they play. She did not listen until one of my nephews stole her credit card and used it to buy a bunch of crap online.
I'll keep using turkey out of habit but it's not like it's an uncommon occurrence for a country to ask that a different name be used.
Which is weird enough, since Italy is literally called "Repubblica Italiana" on our own passports, but we never call it that.
Maybe the best example would be pronouncing Iran correctly.
Why? This just seems like dick behavior for no benefit to anyone.
Sure, right up until people start using Deutschland. Prescriptivist attempts to control language will always fail.
It does if people use it enough.
How many countries go through some sort of rebrand in a year? Who gets respected and who doesn't? Why?
Or we could just keep calling it what we call it.
I don't see why you'd spend time writing this; if the country wants to be called something by us, it's not too hard to honor the wish.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Or perhaps there are no predominantly Christian countries anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state...
The official also highlighted issues with “robux,” Roblox’s virtual currency. Reports indicated that bot accounts were distributing robux to incentivize children’s participation in the aforementioned problematic activities. Challenges in content oversight
> The inability to effectively monitor and regulate inappropriate content on Roblox
The homosexuality part is kind of absurd, but very in line with other Türkiye policies.
For the rest they seem very reasonable. Predatory monetization methods in games for adults are bad, applying the same methods to children is pure evil.
I will prefer strong regulations than banning. The same the we do with gambling.
Another important point for people who want to dead name Turkiye is this: When South Sudan was separate from Sudan, they were called South Sudan. Nobody disputed their name. If Turkiye split in two one day, one might call itself "Eastern Turkiye". In that case I just hope nobody tells them, 'no I will call you "Eastern Turkey" because that's what the other country was called which you were part of before.' We are not called "Ottoman Kingdom 2.0" for some reason. Now we apparently chose ourselves a new name to be referred in foreign languages. They did not consult me, tbh. But it fits what we call it in our original language (we call it "Türkiye"), so I am actually happy about it. So if you show respect to that decision then you show that as it is. If you don't respect it then, well you don't, and that's that. No kebap for you (/s).
About Roblox: My nephew coming of age invited me to play computer games. He told me to install Roblox but I haven't even heard about it and it did not appeal to me. I told him to install Sven-Co-op, because Half-Life is awesome and Sven Co-Op gives you multiplayer feature for free. We played for a while but he was dead bored and he quit. I was genuinely hurt but did not show it. New generation likes other things I guess. Then we played Roblox and honestly it had worse graphics than Half-Life, which is 25 years old game. Somehow it was boring to me but enjoyable to my Gen Z nephew. Well I hope he won't get too hardly shaken by the news, anyhow, somehow I feel relieved about this ban. These days he talks about "making his own games". I want to wait until a bit before I tell him the bad news about making games, but in general I am happy about the direction he is thinking.
We call ourselves Indian and the country India in English. It would be a bit odd to hear someone refer Bharat in English.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/6/india-or-bharat-what...
What I think stayed his hand was Pakistani nationalists saying they would rename Pakistan to India, if India renamed itself to Bharat.
https://www.indy100.com/news/india-name-change-bharat-pakist...
Part of the appeal of Roblox, to my limited understanding, is the ability to create content ("games") for it. This is the platform's two-edged sword, though, since their content moderation seems either insufficient or otherwise lacking for my tastes.
It's kind of the same problem with reddit: there is good content there, but there's also some of the worst things imaginable outside of *chan or *leaks. I pay a lot of attention when I notice any of my teenage kids are looking at any subreddit.
Nobody calls Germany "Deutschland" outside of Germany (okay, outside of German-speaking countries)
Nobody calls Japan "Nihon" except people in Japan
Nobody calls Finland "Suomi" except people living there
...and the same goes for cities.
People probably still call it Turkey because they know how to pronounce it. Both the "ü" and the "iy" are very uncommon (and thus hard to pronounce) sounds for most of the world.
> Both the "ü" and the "iy" are very uncommon (and thus hard to pronounce) sounds for most of the world.
Then what about Liechtenstein? Kyrgyzstan? Côte d’Ivoire? Colombia-not-columbia? The list goes on.
> Côte d’Ivoire
Nobody except french speaking countries call it that. It's called "Ivory Coast" in English, for example
Côte d’Ivoire is indeed also known as "Ivory Coast"; still, you can write a sentence in English with "Côte d’Ivoire" and it doesn't raise an eyebrow[2]. If that's not enough, there's Curaçao too.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_the_Czech_Republic#Ado...
[2]: https://www.state.gov/countries-areas/cote-divoire
[1]: https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2022/02/0815180...
I could do more food puns but I’m already getting Hungary.
People pronounces harder country names(like Liechtenstein,Guinea-Bissau, Djibouti...) easily, I don't think it will be difficult to say Turkiye.
You can pronounce it like "Turquia" which is acceptable.
Here's how to pronunce better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfFZK6b2jtI&t=21s
And flagging is too often just bullies' super-downvote.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_the_Czech_Republic#Ado...
[1] Admittedly the diacritic is an umlaut not diaeresis, but I take your point to be about the (supposedly) foreign appearance of Türkiye.