[duluca]

Lol. Yes they do. There are dozens of instances of names of places being changed due to what the local population wants it to be called. Putting politics aside, disambiguating from the bird turkey is smart from a marketing and tourism sense.

[kelnos]

Names of places do certainly change, but that does not dictate how those names are spelled/represented in other languages.

Now, you or anyone else can certainly spell it "Türkiye" instead of "Turkey", but a) you risk confusing people (which you may or may not care about), and b) typing "ü" is awkward on many (most? all?) English-layout keyboards. I suppose you could also spell it "Turkiye", which I suppose is closer to what the Turkish government wants, but is still "incorrect".

At any rate, I personally see little reason to change unless popular usage overwhelmingly changes. At least in the US, popular usage (which influences dictionaries) dictates English spelling, not governments.

[duluca]

I don't think this is about umlauts. Like you said, it is a name. I'm from Turkey and my name is spelled Doğuhan, but as I was immigrating to the US (before Unicode was commonly used) it became Doguhan. A lot of native English speakers struggle with it, almost no one pronounces it right, they misspell even after seeing it written in front of their faces. I did play around with the idea of going by Doug during college, but then I decided that I wanted to retain my unique identity. It took years for some of my friends to stop calling me Doug, but they did change. It'll be okay, people will adapt, umlauts or none. Otherwise, people will do what they'll do. Some idiots still refer to Istanbul (correct spelling İstanbul btw) as Constantinople. C'est la vie

[arp242]

Clearly there are limits to what is reasonable though; Vietnam is the common spelling in English, and I think it would be unreasonable to demand everyone spells it as Việt Nam. I can type most diacritics without too much effort, but no idea how to do that ệ double diacritic.

The title on HN actually gets it "wrong" by the way, as it's supposed to be Türkiye, not Turkiye.

Things can have more than one spelling or name, and the "best" one depends on context and personal preference. You can argue from Constantinople to Istanbul about this; but it all seems rather pointless. I wish people would just accept that other people have different preferences. This fits in the "color vs. colour" or "courgette vs. zucchini" category.

Whether Türkiye or Turkiye catches on and becomes the more common spelling? We'll see. I guess it will eventually, but it may take a while.

[midoridensha]

At least "Vietnam" is somewhat close to the native spelling. I live in Japan, and the English name is nothing at all like the native name (日本, romanized as "nihon"). But you don't see the Japanese government throwing a fit over this. Furthermore, the name in many other languages is the same or much like "Japan": in German, it's spelled the same, but pronounced "yapan" since there's no (English) J sound. What does the Turkish government have to say about the Japanese name for Turkey ("トルコ", romanized as "toruko")? If the Turkish government insisted they spell it "Türkiye", no one here is going to pay attention because none of those characters are part of the Japanese language, nor is that name even pronounceable using the sounds available.

[supercheetah]

It did make it confusing though. For a long time as a kid, I always wondered why I never heard native Japanese speakers say "Japan" unless they were speaking English. While I couldn't understand it, I could somewhere reasonably sometimes hear words where I've seen it's romanization, but not ever hearing "Japan" was quite baffling for a long time.

[rat9988]

You don't have to feel so strongly about other countries pronunciation. It doesn't matter much. You can still use Turkey and people will understand what you talk about. The problem will only arise in official communications between governments. I believe you aren't part of them anyway.

[Gibbon1]

> it's supposed to be Türkiye, not Turkiye.

English doesn't have umlauts

[arp242]

It's not uncommon to have various diacritics in loanwords; e.g. über, führer, señor, façade, crème brûlée, or proper names such as Schrödinger, Gödel. All of these can be spelled without the diacritic too, but also with it.

[Gibbon1]

Native English speaker have literally no idea what umlauts means. And the connection between how a word is spoken vs how it's spelled is tenuous indeed. So really there isn't any point.

[earthling8118]

This is the important part. Sure, go ahead and add whatever decorations to the characters you want. 99%+ of us will have no idea what they mean and treat them like they don't exist. Pronouncing those isn't taught to the vast majority because they are not even remotely commonly used. What use is any extra indication when nobody knows what it means?

[midoridensha]

It's not smart when they're demanding the use of a Turkish word that doesn't fit into English characters or pronunciation rules.

And why aren't they making the same demands of other languages anyway? How about Chinese? How exactly would their new name fit into Chinese, a language that doesn't use Latin characters at all? Not to mention all the other European languages that do?

[pyuser583]

Ok, fine. But from now on I’m buying a Thanksgiving Türkiye.

[mlindner]

Türkiye is not representable in English so it will never be used for in any article written in English that's not being written for some diplomatic purpose.

[midoridensha]

>There are dozens of instances of names of places being changed due to what the local population wants it to be called.

Sorry, no, not outside a country, when dealing with foreign languages. Every language has different names for other countries, and they're frequently quite different from each other. Countries have no way of forcing foreign languages to adopt any particular name in those languages.

[zimpenfish]

> Sorry, no, not outside a country, when dealing with foreign languages.

Are you saying there's no instances where a country has "rebranded" (for want of a better term) its own name and people outside that country have gone along with it?