Exactly. "Earth" means the planet we live on and "earth" means soil. The disrespect of the meaning conveyed by not using the correct case is noxious and sloppy.
Is it a right of any nation to assert what other nations call it? Can America ask China to stop calling them 美国 (Měiguó) and call them the USA?
The problem with the turkey rebranding is that it was a mere orthographic update, but it is using orthography that is very non standard(whatever that means for English), including using a diacritic rarely seen in English.
I could get behind it more if they completely changed the name, like a when Swaziland switched to eswatini. But for now, you can pry turkey from my cold dead hands
Yes? It's obviously the case that countries can ask this?
We can choose not to do it, I guess, but place names change all the time. Istanbul vs Constantinople. New York vs New Amsterdam. Myanmar vs Burma. Czechia vs Czech Republic. Swaziland vs Eswatini.
I was gearing up to suggest that diaeresis very absolute valid English, but dug in a bit. It's not just a u with a diacritic. Ü is a separate letter in Turkish, with a more "ooh" or "ouh" like sound. TIL.
> if they completely changed the name, like a when Swaziland switched to eswatini.
It's "Eswatini" with a capital letter and no, it's not a complete change. In both cases the word means the place of the Swazi/Swati people. If you're not aware that Southern African languages use prefixes such as "e-" as well as suffixes (like e.g. the suffix "-land" in English) then I guess it's harder to recognise the word stem. But they are related terms, not a "complete change".
Regular Turkish people may not. The Turkish government, in official diplomatic communications, most certainly would if those countries requested it.
I don't think we are required to start calling it Turkey in the vernacular. Regular Turkish people don't have to change their names for countries in their language either. I only pointed out Turkey/Türkiye in my original post to head off smart-asses. Using proper casing for the name is much more important.
Yes! I originally read the headline as "a turkey" because of the lack of a capital T.
They can call themselves what they want, but it unreasonable of the Turks to expect English speakers to write their country's name with characters which are not part of our alphabet.
Yeah I'm not gonna type out the u with an umlaut (?) myself on an message board. If I were writing to the UN or to the Turkish embassy I'd copy-paste it. But lowercasing a proper noun is egregious.
It's the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse.
This headline makes it sound like the IT systems of a cosmetic surgeon have been attacked by poultry.