[argestes]

Yeah, I'm from Turkey and it's really annoying for me to use a keyboard shortcuts to select "Türkiye" from dropdowns using year old "T", "U", "R" keys. Now in some websites it's "Turkey" and in some websites it's "Türkiye" I need to switch keyboard layouts just to select my country name.

Even though, website doesn't let me use my actual name since my name has non ascii characters so I need to try many times.

[danhau]

This reminds me of my own struggles in locating my country in various dropdowns. Sometimes it‘s the trivial to find Austria, but sometimes Österreich under O and other times Österreich under Ö (sorted to the very bottom). Collation is fun!

[sigio]

I feel your pain, looking at 'The Netherlands', 'Netherlands/Nederland', Holland, and even once 'Kingdom of The Netherlands'

[yongjik]

Greetings from Korea, aka South Korea, aka Republic of Korea.

[umanwizard]

I’ve noticed that South Koreans often use the term “Korea” to refer to their country, and I’ve always been curious: are they referring to all of Korea, or only the south?

For example, which of these statements would you be more likely to use colloquially?

(a) Korea’s population is about 80 million, or (b) Korea’s population is about 50 million.

[yongjik]

The term could refer to either South Korea or Korea as a whole, depending on the context. As for your example, I think people would agree with (b) because when you're talking about populations people implicitly assume we're talking about a country.

On the other hand, people say "Korea's history reaches back thousands of years," and obviously here "Korea" means Korea as a whole (the country of South Korea wasn't founded until 1948!).

It gets extra confusing for Koreans because North Koreans use a different Korean word for "Korea" (either North Korea or Korea as a whole) - they are from two different historical names. So we can't even agree on how to call ourselves. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[umanwizard]

Thanks for the explanation!

> I think people would agree with (b) because when you're talking about populations people implicitly assume we're talking about a country.

Yeah, that makes sense, but the confusing part for me is that, at least if my understanding is correct, the South Korean government doesn’t legally recognize the partition of Korea. So they think all those 80 million people are rightfully citizens of their country (that is, the Republic of Korea), even though 30 million are temporarily subject to an illegitimate regime. But I’m not sure if people actually think like this in practice.