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by dryrun 1036 days ago
I find this take so odd. I presume your are from the US, which is a country with so many cultures flowing in, but from your post you will not accept that a friend of yours may have accents in their name, or that a dish may have accents in it, and will forever misspell them.

When I have friends like that (well, my brother too), I make a point of typing it the way it's supposed to be written, out of courtesy and fun and proudness, like I'm clever enough to type any character I want with my keyboard, because I master it and I master other languages. The day I'll learn how to type Chinese characters fluently, I'll be so happy ! Not to boast, but it will mean I unlocked a whole new world!

3 comments

In human languages, each culture develops its own name for each different culture they interact with. That name is a separate concept to how the other culture calls themselves. Sometimes, the two names are relatively similar (France / France, though pronounced slightly differently), other times its completely different (Germany / Deutschland, Hungarian / Magyarország). This is a simple fact about how human languages work. The country called Turkey in English calls themselves Türkiye in their own language. They have asked certain international bodies to refer to them by that name as well, and those bodies have of course accepted. But those bodies do not "speak English", and there isn't any expectation that speakers of English should change their language as well.

Now, there is nothing wrong with calling it Türkiye in your own everyday speech, but it is not any kind of sign of good manners - it's simply a matter of personal taste. You'd still probably call their language "Turkish", while they call it "Türkçe", and the people living there "Turks" or "Turkish people", when they call themselves "Türkler", and even if you didn't you'd probably use your own grammar to conjugate these words as necessary etc.

yes actually? America literally doesn't use any accents so we write stuff without them. we basically never even use them on cafe, resume, words of that sort. like japanese has no L sound. so (if google translate is to be believed) their exonym for Lithuania is pronounced "Ritoania", and uses an entirely different alphabet.

if you want to learn to use endonyms for countries cool! but most people aren't interested in that level of effort for the whole world. there are ten thousand other things that occupy their minds, every one jockeying for a spot, and this being a passion of yours doesn't change that.

idk why you think there should be any different rules from this, except the general sense of anti-Americanism that seems to pervade this discussion.

That’s great of you, the burden might be different when asking hundreds of millions of people.