I'm very surprised if the request from China comes with a western alphabet.
PS: In Vancouver, they've been experimenting with a return to historic place names. For example, šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl’e7énk Square (aka the art gallery plaza)
It'd be funny if it was considered rude to not refer to China in writing as 中华人民共和国.
> PS: In Vancouver, they've been experimenting with a return to historic place names. For example, šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl’e7énk Square (aka the art gallery plaza)
For those who are curious about the "7", this is the ASCII-fication of the modifier letter called glottal stop (Unicode: ˀ):
(Also, I'm not Canadian, but I found this character looking for some weird exception to "What is a letter?" when answering a StackOverflow question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/52644458/235908)
Oh my, I don't even know the names of those letters.
Edit: Found more info about this:
> The area previously known as Queen Elizabeth Theatre Plaza has been renamed šxʷƛ̓exən Xwtl’a7shn, and the Vancouver Art Gallery's north plaza has been dubbed šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl’e7énk Square.
According to the city, šxʷƛ̓exən Xwtl’a7shn means "a place one is invited to, and a place one is invited to celebrate" [..]. The other name, šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl’e7énk Square, refers to a place where cultural gatherings such as weddings and funerals are held.
The names were chosen by a committee of city staff and representatives of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
Each uses words from both the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ language used by the Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language of the Squamish Nation.
I am puzzled how the people of Vancouver (nevermind visitors) are meant to use "šxʷƛ̓exən Xwtl’a7shn" or "šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl’e7énk". I mean, if you see things like "Musqueam", "Squamish" and "Tsleil-Waututh", you can muddle through as you learn the sounds. But if you see (the equivalent) "xʷməθkʷəy̓əm", "Sḵwx̱wú7mesh" or "sə̓lílwətaʔɬ", where do you even begin? Yet the official link above, while it helpfully gives both representations of the names of the peoples, makes no effort to do so for the new place names. That strongly suggests any signage will only use the unapproachable version.
Everyone just copy-pastes the name and calls it the art gallery plaza. A mild prank could be played by copy-pasting a completely different place name, and seeing if people pay any attention - or if they just assume "š**** ****" to mean "that place right downtown"
I see that most online references use some variation of "šxʷƛ̓exən Xwtl'a7shn (formerly QET Plaza)". They seem to be very diligent about never providing any transliteration, even in their pronunciation guide. Which means that in effect, rather than giving it an indigenous name, they have instead effectively made it unnamed. What a completely wasted effort.
Finally Thailand can drop it’s anglicized name and be known by it’s true name of “Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit”
Countries (and cities) have initiated all kinds of formal name changes over the years -- some of them have managed stick (Beijing, Kyiv, Burkina Fasso, Myanmar, Timor-Leste, North Macedonia, Eswatini, the Democratic Republic of Congo; and Ukraine dropping the definite article), others not so well (Czechia).
But there's nothing intrinsically weird about the concept as such.
The first thing that came to mind here was the relatively recent shift in the spelling of the Ukrainian capital: what was once Kiev is now Kyiv. Very quickly, Western media and consumer-focused brands changed their spelling to the Ukrainian national preference, obviously in the wake of the Russian invasion.
I wonder if a similar rapid shift will take place with regards to Turkey/Türkiye, or whether it will be more of a Czech Republic/Czechia thing where, despite being the official name since 2016 at the UN, the name Czech Republic remains largely in use.
It reminds me a bit more of people who correct "Ka-tar" to be "Cutter" even though all three vowel sounds in the actual pronunciation of the country don't exist in English (and the actual Qataris don't care and won't correct you if you use "Ka-tar").
Kyiv is a bit more obvious since it is being done to show support for Ukraine (which means that certain people will lose their minds over it being "performative" to show their support but yes, that's why people are doing it -- and it should be obvious why actual Ukrainians might have a sore spot over a more Russian-sounding pronunciation of their capital right now). That one at least has a strong common emotional reason behind it. In other cases we get weird fetishes for non-English pronunciations in English even though we don't for thousands of other place names.
It's likely been Kyiv in Ukraine even longer than that. I was referring to the wave of mainstream media stories around renaming things like Chicken Kiev to Chicken Kyiv as a result of the war.
well they keep using Czechoslovak flag (the blue triangle represents Slovakia) despite agreement they signed that they won't do it, so it's only fair to ignore the new name as well - Czechia with Czechoslovak flag = Czechoslovakia, Slovakia with Slovak flag = Slovakia
This is beyond weird. Where does this convention apply? Maps? Casual language? International diplomacy only?
Should the Deutsch refer to Griechenland as the Ελληνική Δημοκρατία, or Frankreich as France? Does this mean they can demand the rest of the English world to stop calling München as Munich and Köln as Cologne?
I don't see anything wrong with countries being called by their real names.
It will take a while for everybody to get used to, but in the end we'll get rid of all the ambiguity.
I can't help but wonder if the arousal over Türkiye has more to do with the person in charge there at the moment.
This question should be asked to the Swiss themselves, not to any outsider like me. I'm sure they can agree on a name, and I guess they did already because the official Swiss country code is 'CH' which doesn't correspond to any of their four internal country names.
To let outsiders decide what a country should be called, despite the country itself objecting, is beyond weird to me. How would you like it when your colleagues decided to call you by another name, just because they liked it better?
> I'm sure they can agree on a name, and I guess they did already because the official Swiss country code is 'CH' which doesn't correspond to any of their four internal country names.
To my knowledge absolutely no one calls them the "Confoederatio Helvetica" in normal conversation, neither the Swiss themselves nor foreigners. (And ironically that name seems to have its roots in an occupation by the French revolutionary army and a name given by Napoleon Bonaparte)
Also, I don't think you can always assume inhabitants of a country can agree to a common name. Often, names are heavily associated with political issues or power or identity issues and it may be impossible to choose a particular name and staying neutral in the conflict.
Example: Try to ask some people from Northern Ireland whether the name of the city is "Derry" or "Londonderry".
> How would you like it when your colleagues decided to call you by another name, just because they liked it better?
This already happens. It’s called nicknames. Sometimes a name in its original tongue is hard to pronounce for others, so we adopt a simpler one for convenience.
> This question should be asked to the Swiss themselves, not to any outsider like me. ... To let outsiders decide what a country should be called, despite the country itself objecting, is beyond weird to me.
Exonyms are very much a question for the outsiders. Nothing even remotely weird about it.
> How would you like it when your colleagues decided to call you by another name, just because they liked it better?
But they very often do, so what can you do about that? For example I seriously doubt that any large group outside of China calls Chinese nationals with proper tones, so that's over one billion people being "called by another name" in one fell swoop.
That was my point though. They have multiple country names. Swiss diplomats refer to their country by different names depending on the language they speak.
Why should a country have only one name across the whole world regardless of language being spoken? What are countries without Latin languages to do: write “Turkiye” amidst their non-latin script?
And what of the Kurds? Is their spelling now wrong?
Turkiye is how it is spelt in Turkish. Every other language has its own spelling and pronunciation. This happens with all countries.
> Would you kindly tell me the “real” name of Switzerland, a country with four official languages.
If you ask someone from Switzerland you will probably get 2-3 different words for the different languages they know. Being multilingual is the norm over there.
It's not weird, it's simple patriotism from the last sultan, seeing his empire folding. Catching the last straw to get media attention and unite his people.
The convention is to use the simplest common language (english) for such names, not the original, internal names.
And Greece is certainly called Ελλάδα inside, not the "Greek Democracy".
Such requests would not lead far. As you can see that still everybody refuses to write Japanese names (e.g. in sports) in the correct order. It got better with Chinese and Korean names recently, but foreigners are still extremely wrong about Japanese conventions.
> And Greece is certainly called Ελλάδα inside, not the "Greek Democracy".
I assume you translated the "Ελληνική Δημοκρατία" of the parent comment somehow, but it is not correct. The actual translation is "Hellenic Republic", which is what is written in official documents (for example, on passport covers).
As you correctly point out, the state name (Hellenic Republic) is not always the country name (Hellas).
I tend to use the original German, Italian, Spanish, French place names even when speaking English in fact. I don't know why, I like it that way. Aren't Köln, Munich [edit München], Zürich, Venezia, Firenze beautiful names?
The original names would be in various local dialects.
Venezia is Italian, which is a slightly artificial language pushed by the authorities 150 years ago in order to administer the newly unified country more efficiently. Only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly when the nation was unified in 1861.
The game of "original" is extra tricky in Europe, with its long succession of cultures and empires. Quite a lot of settlements around the Mediterranean would originally be named either in Greek, or in Phoenician.
By Anglicizing those names for your use, you aren't doing anything bad, you're only repeating a process that has taken place many times before.
I don't mean any personal offense, but as an American I associate this behavior with "you can't afford not to travel" and "eating $regionalFood in $location has ruined the dish for me; I can't eat it anywhere else" types.
It’s not a joke. I’m trying to make sense of your logic and whether there is any consistency in it. I won’t fault you for preferring one name over its translation but clearly we do this for aesthetic reasons only, not some drive to be correct or authentic because we certainly don’t apply that consistently.
Have you always referred to Japan as Nihon, Croatia as Hrvatska, Austria as Österreich, and generally avoided the translated forms of country names of every country[1]? Every language has its own approach to writing and pronouncing the names of other parts of the world. English is no exception. "Correct" is whatever the speakers of the language use in reality, not what an authority prescribes.
This is simply about what the United Nations (not you, not me) calls a member state. For example "Germany" is the official name of that sovereign entity as far as UN is concerned. Previously there were 2 of them, one officially named as "The Federal Republic of Germany", and the other "German Democratic Republic".
Also see:
"On 17 May 2016 the Permanent Mission of the Czech Republic to the United Nations informed the UN that the short name to be used for the country is Czechia."
>"On 17 May 2016 the Permanent Mission of the Czech Republic to the United Nations informed the UN that the short name to be used for the country is Czechia."
which are both CORRECT English name for same country, completely different as replacing corect English name of the country with local name of the country
Kolkata, just as Bombay is now Mumbai (since 1995), and similarly, how Peking is now Beijing. In that light the name change for Türkiye is not really novel or unreasonable. A growing number of countries are of the opinion that they should have some say on the exonyms used in English, especially when that language is used as the lingua franca at bodies like the UN.
It just makes sense in the airplane and internet age to revisit these names.
I knew the names "Pekin" and "Pondicherry" were (bad) attempts at Romanizing the local pronunciation. Since this was done in the 1600's, there was no way to have a local native speaker record himself saying the correct name and replay it back for Europeans ears.
"Peking" approximates how it may have been pronounced at one point, but the pronunciation has changed, making that approximation even worse than it started with.
For the record, not all languages use "Beijing" either: pekín is common in Spanish.
Speakers of non tonal languages are not about to learn the tone system for a truly authentic pronunciation of Beijing. And if they did, should they also learn the Cantonese place names and tone system where it is common, in addition to the Mandarin ones?
And the Chinese, for that matter, have a rather...interesting approach to spelling and pronouncing foreign place names.
Different languages have different sounds. There are some English place names that are hard for someone from Japan to pronounce and vice versa.
Layer in multi lingual countries and regions, regional accents, different writing systems, . multiple local place names, and political concerns and the problem becomes even harder.
Until we all speak the One True Language, we will forever have those impedence mismatches, and harmonizing place names will be doomed to fail.
> "Peking" approximates how it may have been pronounced at one point, but the pronunciation has changed, making that approximation even worse than it started with.
You're saying it's written the way it was pronounced centuries ago but isn't anymore? Well, then that makes "Peking" the perfect spelling for the English language! ;)
Curious how long it will take the iso-codes project https://salsa.debian.org/iso-codes-team/iso-codes to get updated. This package is used by country libraries in many programming languages and systems because it provides XML and JSON versions of relevant standards like ISO 3166-1 (countries and territories), ISO 3166-2 (subdivisions), etc.
For systems that rely on country data it is better to use ISO 3166-1 Alpha2 or Alpha3 codes because those don't change as often and don't have pesky issues with articles, diacritics, and cumbersome official names.
If I went to Japan (okay, 日本国) and got offended when they wrote and pronounced ニューヨーク (that's New York to you) in a written form not mine and a pronunciation not mine, I'm sure most Westerners would regard that as bigotry and boorishness on my part.
There's one inconvenience with country names with non ASCII-7 characters: country drop-down lists. They are so long you almost always start typing the name first. If you are looking for, say, a hotel in Turkey (now Turkiye) you don't necessarily have the keyboard layout to readily type ü.
In fact country lists are probably one of the most annoying unsolved problems in UI to date. Especially where you are asked for your phone number and the country code is a drop-down. Seriously, how is finding an item in a 200+ list easier than typing 1-3 digits? And especially if the web site is in a foreign language and you don't even know what your country is called in that language? (Been in this situation in France once, had to urgently sign up on a web site with my UK phone number that I had at the time, ended up googling what the UK is called in French just because the web site required my phone number!)
Country drop downs have many low hanging improvements possible but nobody seems to do them. For example: put the 4-5 most populous countries at the top of the list. Or: make an effort to guess what country the user is from and float that to the top.
Instead I'm usually left to scroll down to the 'U's and I always overshoot.
Here is another: just a text box where you start typing in any language, whatever character set/keyboard Latin or not, and it brings you the closest matches. You don't need to see the full list of countries just to select one of them. A menu with 200+ items (let alone localization problems) is just so anti-UI, how come we accepted this as a norm?
Particular annoying are localized, originally English drop-down menus, where they translated the items, but did not update the alphabetical ordering. Quite confusing until you realize that you have to scroll much further than Denmark to find Germany, even though they would be next to each other in the language they are using.
Depending on the database server used and if database-level filtering is used, this isn't a problem at all. In some collations "u" is equal to "ü" in filtering and sorting.
England is a country within the United Kingdom located mostly on the island Great Britain within the British Isles.
So it depends on which of those things you refer to. Great Britain isn't a country, the UK is a nation composed of 4 countries, England is one of those 4.
Not being Irish, it seems both refer to the same place, but there is an Irish nationalist or unionist political statement being made when choosing one or the other, so one could be looking for one of these names and not find it, depending on what website you're using. Both are arguably "native" names.
The Netherlands vs. Netherlands vs. Netherlands, The.
Lots of people are ignorant of all sorts of things. The relationships of the former members of the (former) British Empire are particularly complex.
Languages aren't countries. Geographic locations aren't necessarily parts of a single country (contested territories are a thing), and immigrants to one location may not read/write the language of the location they live in. ISO 639-3[1] is language codes, and they are NOT ISO 3166 [2] country codes. There are fewer country codes than language codes, which tempts lazy people to use country codes for language dropdowns.
Am I supposed to tell people I'm from Türkiye from now on? Will be fun explaining to them it's not a silly joke, but the new official name of the country. Although you know what, it might lead to some good party banter.
You're not supposed to do anything (well, strictly speaking, I guess that depends on the whim of your autocratic government), because language is use. You can call it Turkey if that works for you (and most will for a long time). Depending on the context you can choose to be correct (or pedantic), or just casual.
If you are talking to some tourists who struggle with English, you would use 'Turkey' to avoid making the communication harder than it needs to be; if you are in charge of making those neat desktop country name signs at a diplomatic meating though… In five years time it may well be accepted to write 'Türkiye' in a table of countries with some values in some paper or article, or may be not. Such are the vagueries of applied language.
Just kidding, I'm not changing the way I call the country, only maybe as a joke. What the Erdogan foreign ministry is doing is a silly diversion from the general shitshow, not even Turks themselves (or a large majority of them) take this seriously.
Seems reasonable that a country should get to decide what its name is, but a step too far if this implies an insistence on how other languages refer to it.
ü isn’t a letter in a lot of languages, which creates practical problems like trying to type it on their local keyboard layouts.
Türkiye might be the official name in Turkish but we’re still going to need translations of it into other languages and alphabets.
IMHO we should try to capture the sound of the country’s native name using English rules of orthography. I think this would give us something like “Tooakeay”.
I wonder if it would make sense to make some simplified latin alphabet for use in international communication. Basically remove every letter that isn't very commonly used in some country.
Let's start with bcdqwxz I think there is likely some more.
The Ottoman traders brought the "turkey" bird from the Americas to trade.. ultimately embarrassing the modern day Turkey enough to force change its name.
Ottomans took it as an insult when called Turks and avoided Turks in their upper echelons particularly after 14th century. Funny how they scored one last point like this. Disclaimer: I'm of Turkish origin and I still find it very funny.
I always find it even more silly and matronising and insulting that other countries don't adopt the way country calls itself. If that one would be relatively simple and easy to do.
You find it "silly" that other languages with their own rules don't adopt phrases which may be impossible to use within those languages? For example in the Czech language there's nothing "relatively simple and easy to do" about using "Turkey" or "Türkiye" in Czech sentences since it's impossible to inflect these words using Czech case suffixes, so the official name of the country in Czech is "Turecko" simply so that you could actually use it in sentences without getting a brain aneurysm.
The question is for what language code that is. Geo name translations are a fascinating topic. Here are all the translations that geonames.org has for Turkey:
This doesn't make any sense unless they used Turkey in Turkish language, which I doubt. Otherwise now Germany will change into Deutschland in English, Poland to Polska, etc.?
Good luck figuring differences between 日本 and 中国 or even better figure out what are these countries - ราชอาณาจักรไทย, ព្រះរាជាណាចក្រកម្ពុជា and ပြည်ထောင်စု သမ္မတ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံတော် .
Countries can still opt to use an exonym if it pleases them, and when the local name is not in written in the Latin script a romanization is used, so Japan in your example would not be 日本, but Nihon or Nippon. As it stands, the Japanese prefer Japan, so it will remain Japan for the foreseeable future. Türkiye chooses otherwise, and that is fine too (although whether the change is just for diplomatic use or broader depends on how it is promoted in the decades to come).
Wikipedia will be the absolute last to change the name due to their policies on names and a cohort of Wikipedians who really hate it when peoples/institutes/nations insist on deciding on their own names. Beijing got through back in 2008 or so (and Mumbai and Kolkata in 2003), because editors were apparently more inclined to be reasonable back then.
The smaller the place, the more likely old, nearly unused names persist. Dutch Wikipedia is the last place on the internet where a local village is called by a name no longer used for over thirty years. The article name cannot be changed (any change will be reverted within hours). The village, like most in the bilingual province of Frisia, has a Frisian and a Dutch name, but in the nineties the Dutch one was amended to match the Frisian one by dropping a 'w' at the end. Since then signage and use (Dutch language newspapers and other media, local websites, official use as well as local use) have followed and the name is decidedly, and verifiably, just that one name.
But the article name on the Dutch Wikipedia cannot be changed no matter what references you bring (because these get discarded because 'government sources don't count', and 'local use just means they use the Frisian name in Dutch'), and even on the English Wikipedia where at least the article name is correct, the old name is listed as its 'Dutch' name. Wikipedia has policies about names set in stone, and on the Dutch version those policies refer to a list published by an official Dutch language institute. That single reference lists the old name in a table listing Dutch and Frisian names for places, and so Wikipedia refuses to bend (which is convenient if you are a Wikipedian who dislikes our provincial minority language).
Wikipedia has, unfortunately, quite a few examples of such cognitive dissonance.
Or in the relevant ISO standards. I remember when Eritrea gained its own iso code a few years ago. That required us to upgrade a few things to handle new iso codes showing up in data sets. It takes surprisingly long for this stuff to trickle through to all the relevant systems.
What do you mean "official latin name"? Seems to me the only Latin alphabet language without diacritics is English, but then we do use them in English for certain borrowed words (façade, piñata) or fringe uses (coöperate). I wonder how these are handled in a context like the UN where multiple languages are used.
Most countries that use more than the standard latin script have at least one version of their name in latin so that everyone else can use it. საქართველო, Ελλάδα, Россия etc aren't very usable written like that. I would understand if Turkey applied for the romanized version of their name but using diacritics in it makes it a pain in the ass for everyone else.
> I would understand if Turkey applied for the romanized version of their name
This I just don't understand. Turkish is written in a Latin script with a few diacritics (and the extra character of the i without the dot.) It's hard to call any modification of their existing script a "romanization".
As for some of your examples, eg. Россия, I don't think they use a romanization of that word like Rossija or Rossiya at the UN, I think they use English or French translations of Russian Federation.
And in english it's "Ivory Coast", in german it's "Elfenbeinküste".
None of those is an official name tho, they are quite insistent that's exclusively the french one:
>Therefore, in April 1986, the government declared that Côte d'Ivoire (or, more fully, République de Côte d'Ivoire) would be its formal name for the purposes of diplomatic protocol, and has since officially refused to recognize any translations from French to other languages in its international dealings.
Funny to note is that this sometimes goes wrong, i.e., in Dutch we have a Witte Neushoorn (White Rhino, or, White Nosehorn if you will), however, this Rhino is not white but it has a wide mouth and English people call (or called) it Wide Rhino... Somewhere someone misunderstood and now we have a White Rhino that is grey.
Not sure what you mean: "Türkiye" is the (official) Turkish name, "Turkey" is the English name. The Romans did not have a name for it, as it didn't exist at that time - and for most of its history, it was called the "Ottoman Empire"...
Woah there... Türkiye could very well become the English name as well. Language is fluid. It really depends on if they ask English speakers to change, and if they do.
It's unlikely that English speakers will use diacritics except as a point of trivia. Cafe, naive and even resume have lost their diacritics in practice (ime).
“Czech Republic” was always a mouthful so it’s unsurprising that Czechia caught on. But if they had made it Česká then I doubt it would have been adopted so easily.
It didn't really caught on, still way too many English media use Czech Republic instead Czechia, honestly I've never used Czech Republic, it was always Czechia even before they officially applied for UN change.
It would be also nice, if they finally stopped using Czechoslovak flag and uphold dissolution agreement that no successor country can use Czechoslovak flag, becayse you know that blue triangle in flag represents Slovakia, so it's quite funny they keep using it. The solution is obvious, use previous "Polish" style flag and just slap on it the emblem with lion to distinguish from Poland.
