[HN Gopher] ISO name change for Turkiye
___________________________________________________________________
ISO name change for Turkiye
Author : Koffiepoeder
Score : 221 points
Date : 2022-07-12 06:47 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.iso.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.iso.org)
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| What has it changed to?
| tomerv wrote:
| Turkey -> Turkiye
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| In that case they should fix the title. It should be: ISO
| name change for Turkey
| Havoc wrote:
| As someone with a special character in my name - would not
| recommend. Way too many legacy IT systems and poorly configured
| ones
| juanci_to wrote:
| I was disappointed last year when filling an official COVID-19
| form made by the Spanish Government that didn't support the
| acute accent in my very common (Spanish) last name.
| tpoacher wrote:
| I wonder how Turkiyish people feel about this change
| m3rcury wrote:
| As a Turkish citizen, I found this change as stupid as hell
| ismaildonmez wrote:
| Unnecessary stunt from the government.
| Abimelex wrote:
| when the standard doesn't respect itself:
|
| > List source: Turk Standardlari Enstitusu (TSE), 1995-08-01;
| Administrative Map of __Turkey__ 2000;
| mort96 wrote:
| How does ISO country names actually work? It's clearly using the
| English name for countries; Norway is listed as Norway, not as
| Norge. Does that mean Turkiye is now the English name for the
| country? Or is it now the only country with its own language's
| name rather than the English name in the registry?
|
| Basically, what's going on here?
| em500 wrote:
| This is part of the ISO-3166 standard (free draft here[1],
| official pdf is payware[2]). AFAIK the ISO standards are only
| available in English and French, so you'll only get the English
| and French names.
|
| The United Nations has a list of official country names in six
| languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish)
| [3]. Beyond that, if you want official country names in their
| native languages or X country in Y language, you'll have to
| compile them yourself.
|
| [1]
| https://cdn.standards.iteh.ai/samples/72482/cbb6318e772a4f22...
|
| [2] https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html (links to
| the pdf near the bottom)
|
| [3] https://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/ungegn/docs/11th-
| uncsgn-... and https://unterm.un.org/
| olalonde wrote:
| They probably defer to the UNGEGN[0] which allows countries to
| submit the official name of their country in various languages.
| Turkey recently requested to change their official English
| name[1].
|
| [0]
| https://unstats.un.org/unsd/ungegn/working_groups/wg1.cshtml
|
| [1] https://turkiye.un.org/en/184798-turkeys-name-changed-
| turkiy...
| guipsp wrote:
| Turkiye is the new official English-language name for the
| country
| [deleted]
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| ISO is not in charge of the English language. I don't expect
| dictionaries to change any time soon just because ISO says
| so. Turkey has been the proper English translation for their
| country name since a very long time and it will be correct
| English for a long time. Of course, with English it is a bit
| unclear in any case who decides what is and isn't correct.
| Certainly not the Turkish government or ISO.
|
| What's next? The Germans insisting on Deutschland as the
| official ISO name (it's still Germany)? The Chinese insisting
| on using chines characters? I'm not sure why ISO did this. It
| sounds political to me.
|
| If you need place name translations, geonames is a decent
| data set: https://www.geonames.org/export/
|
| You can look up the correct translations and transliterations
| by iso country and language code. It still calls Turkey by
| its English name, as it should.
| anamexis wrote:
| In 2016, the country formerly known as The Czech Republic
| declared that its English name was now Czechia.
|
| This is now its official ISO name, how it shows up in the
| Geonames database, and how it is commonly referred to in
| places like news media.
| remedan wrote:
| A small nitpick, the country isn't "formerly known as the
| Czech Republic".
|
| "Czechia" was adopted as the new official short name. The
| long name is still also correct.
| smcl wrote:
| So this is why it's good to pay attention to deeply
| nested HN threads. Because I didn't realise this was the
| case - media covered the "Czech Republic is now
| 'Czechia'" thing and my friend group are split about
| 80/20 (majority using "Czech Republic", inc. me). I'm
| glad to hear both are technically correct!
| anamexis wrote:
| To be completely fair, the context in which it's still
| called "The Czech Republic" is the same context that you
| would say "The Federal Republic of Germany"
| kergonath wrote:
| > If you need place name translations, geonames is a decent
| data set: https://www.geonames.org/export/
|
| That's a great resource to keep around, thanks! A
| convenient source for the unfortunately common "but you
| must not translate place names" argument.
| collegeburner wrote:
| No its not. This is not French, we don't have a governing
| body. And they def can't expect us to use a name with
| characters we can't even type. No way am I looking up to
| copypasta the name every time I need to use it.
| corrral wrote:
| Official? Sure. Actual, in the English language name? No.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I mean there's the official name, which has a canonical
| standard value and we can answer with an easy "yes" or
| "no."
|
| And then there's this fuzzy "actual English language"
| question about, which is pretty hard to answer, and verges
| on philosophical "what even is a language/what is a name?"
| wankery. I can't see how you give a simple yes/no answer to
| that.
| corrral wrote:
| > I can't see how you give a simple yes/no answer to
| that.
|
| I'm looking into my crystal ball and seeing the ~0 people
| who will be able to remember the slightly different and
| alien-looking-to-English spelling, and the even smaller
| value of ~0 who will ever be bothered to use the umlaut.
| bee_rider wrote:
| If language is just decided by popular vote, somebody
| should tell the English that they are using English wrong
| -- there are many more Americans after all.
| corrral wrote:
| Well--that's exactly the case, and that's why you see
| different usage guides and dictionaries for American
| English and British English. "Correct" usage, for values
| of correct that favor clarity for a given audience, does
| indeed differ substantially between American and British
| English, among many other variants and dialects.
|
| What has minimal effect is some international standards
| body trying to dictate usage. Today, and likely for a
| long time to come, if not indefinitely, "Turkey" is less
| distracting or confusing to practically any English-
| speaking audience one might choose, than the new thing.
| The new one's odd-enough looking (again, even just
| considering the letter order) and the old one enough
| entrenched that I expect the old form to be the better
| choice for communication in English for a _long_ time.
| unmole wrote:
| The umlaut says it's not English.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Practically, yes, but Turkey is a sovereign country and it
| can ask the UN to call it in English whatever it likes. And
| indeed - they have requested that their official English-
| language name be now Turkiye. One of the stated reasons is
| that Turkey is homophonic with 'turkey' (the thanksgiving
| meal), which further has a connotation of 'lousy'. This is
| 100% real, their current leadership is a bit strange:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61671913
|
| Of course in reality people will keep on calling them
| Turkey in practical every day English. But the UN has a
| policy of honoring such requests by the country itself -
| probably to avoid meddling in politics.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Wait, I thought Turkiye is homophone with Turkey? Did you
| mean Turkey being homograph with turkey (same spelling
| different meaning). Or is there a pronunciation change
| I've missed?
| ziml77 wrote:
| Isn't the new name pronounced like turkey-ay? I'm fairly
| sure I heard it said that way on some news segment about
| it.
| mynameisash wrote:
| I work with a Turkish woman, and she gave us the rundown
| of pronunciation. Bref, it's pronounced "turkey-ay."
| zarzavat wrote:
| That's in Turkish though. In English the 'e' at the end
| of 'Turkiye' could either be silent, as in _code_ and
| _eye_ , or it could be pronounced as in _Kanye_. It 's
| likely that both pronunciations will be used, similarly
| to _Porsche_ and _Nike_.
|
| Considering that the pronunciation of 'Turkiye' with a
| silent e is almost identical to the standard
| pronunciation of 'Turkey', I suspect this will be the
| primary pronunciation in English and will win out over
| the "Kanye" pronunciation. This would make 'Turkiye' a
| purely orthographic change and not a linguistic one.
| mynameisash wrote:
| Fair, so let me clarify: the pronunciation has always
| been 'turkey-ay', and most other cultures/languages
| pronounce it correctly (by which I mean in-line with how
| native Turks pronounce it). English is an outlier.
| zarzavat wrote:
| On the whole, English tends to be far more accepting of
| foreign spellings and pronunciations than any other
| language.
|
| The idea that the "correct" spelling and pronunciation
| for a loanword is that of the source language is very
| much a quirk of English.
|
| Most languages try to either change the spelling of a new
| loanword to match how it is pronounced, or vice versa.
| English tries to keep _both_ and that 's why English
| spelling is such a mess, because there is French
| orthography, Germany orthography, Greek orthography, etc,
| all mixed together and the only way to know how to spell
| a word is to know its etymology.
|
| Imagine telling the French that the Turkish government
| gets how to decide how the word "Turquie" is spelled in
| French, rather than the Academie Francaise. They would
| die laughing.
| vesinisa wrote:
| I meant that Turkey and turkey are homophones. Apart from
| the capitilization they are also homographs.
|
| Turkey and Turkiye are not homophonic. The BBC article I
| linked has a pronunication guide towards the end:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61671913
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Practically, yes, but Turkey is a sovereign country
| and it can ask the UN to call it in English whatever it
| likes._
|
| Can China ask for it to be called Zhong Guo ?
| vesinisa wrote:
| I presume that might be rejected on the grounds that it
| is a completely different writing system. But my point is
| that even if it was accepted, the true common name of
| China in practical English would still not change. Or did
| you know there already officially exists countries such
| as Czechia and The Holy See - much better known in
| English as The Czech Republic and The Vatican
| respectively?
| jasomill wrote:
| Pedantically, the Holy See[1] is the Pope's jurisdiction,
| which includes his universal ecclesiastical jurisdiction
| in addition to territorial control of a sovereign state.
| This state[2], per the treaty establishing it[3], _is_
| properly referred to as "Vatican City State" (Stato
| della Citta del Vaticano).
|
| This is understandably confused by the fact that it is
| the Holy See, not Vatican City State, that maintains
| foreign relations and participates in international
| organizations like the UN.
|
| This, I assume, is why the official ISO name associated
| with country code VA was at some point changed from
| "Vatican City State (Holy See)" to "Holy See (the)"[4].
|
| Interestingly, both entities issue passports[5].
|
| [1] https://www.vatican.va/
|
| [2] https://www.vaticanstate.va/
|
| [3] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/secretariat_state/
| archivi...
|
| [4] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:VA
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_and_Holy_See_pa
| ssports
| spc476 wrote:
| And a literal translation of that would be "Middle
| Kingdom." So if the Middle Kingdom wants to call itself
| "Middle Kingdom," why not?
| em500 wrote:
| The UN maintains a list of official country names in six
| languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese,
| Arabic) [1], and UN representatives of the countries can
| request how they want their country to be written in any
| of those.
|
| I guess China could request to be called Zhong Guo in
| English communication in the UN and/or ISO (if I
| understand your question correctly). The main issue is
| that if you put up to much friction for other language
| speakers, they're just going to ignore you/the official
| standards and do whatever they want, so it becomes a bit
| self-defeating. I expect this to happen to Turkey as
| well: English speakers will probably mostly keep using
| "Turkey" rather than "Turkiye" indefinitely, except in
| cases where ISO/UN standard are really required.
|
| [1] https://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/ungegn/docs/11th-
| uncsgn-...
| wiredfool wrote:
| Maybe they're trying to cut down the number of labels
| that say:
|
| "Fabrique en Dinde"
| mynameisash wrote:
| I'm assuming you're knowingly joking, so for others:
| 'dinde' is the contraction of French _d 'Inde_, shortened
| from _coq d 'Inde_ or _poule d 'Inde_. So you go to the
| store and buy some dinde for your sandwich. _Fabrique en
| dinde_ would mean something is made of turkey (the bird).
|
| Turkiye was, and I presume still in, _Turquie_ in French.
| So made in Turkiye is _Fabriqie en Turquie_.
| lgeorget wrote:
| Uh? No, I think the point is that labels "Made in Turkey"
| ran the risk of being lazily translated to "Fabrique en
| Dinde" in French by a misconfigured automatic translation
| software and you no longer have this problem if you use
| words spelt differently for the bird and the country.
| Nothing to do with "d'Inde".
| wiredfool wrote:
| Yep. That comment came remembering the pointing and
| laughing and explaining it to the kids.
|
| I do tend to check the labels, sometimes there are jokes
| hidden there.
|
| For example, a computer bag I have from during the Bush
| Administration has a label with the text:
|
| Ne pas secher a la machiene Ne pas repasser Nous sommes
| desoles que notre president soit un idiot. Nous n'avons
| pa vote pour lui.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Most people will likely see this only on online forms
| that lazily just populate their country dropdowns from
| (pirated copies) of the official ISO database.
| jonatron wrote:
| https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html
|
| "ISO allows free-of-charge use of its country, currency
| and language codes from ISO 3166, ISO 4217 and ISO 639,
| respectively."
|
| Doesn't sound like piracy to me.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Yes, but if you actually try to download the collection
| (link right above that text), you are presented with a
| form to pay CHF 300 for this data.
|
| Now I am not a copyright lawyer but this is how I
| understand it: this entire database is a copyrighted work
| owned by ISO. If you pay them CHF 300 you can download
| the database and then use use it freely. But when you
| gather that entire dataset (transformed or not) back to a
| full database format, it is still a derived work - the
| copyright of which is owned by ISO.
|
| This is of course completely hair splitting as you will
| not see ISO coming after anyone spreading the database in
| any format (it would be a PR disaster). But if you asked
| the opinion of a corporate lawyer, they might say you
| technically need to pay ISO before you can use a copy of
| the _entire_ database in your app. And I bet that 's why
| they have the form to pay the CHF 300 if someone
| somewhere has a compliance department telling them to be
| 100% sure they are not breaching any copyrights..
|
| Maybe someone who actually knows anything about copyright
| law can comment..
|
| EDIT: The situation is indeed unclear as I predicted,
| probably on purpose. See here
| https://datahub.io/core/country-list#license :
|
| > It should be noted that this material is ultimately
| sourced from ISO and their rights and licensing policy is
| somewhat unclear. As this is a short, simple database of
| facts there is a strong argument that no rights can
| subsist in this collection. However, ISO state on their
| site:
|
| >> ISO makes the list of alpha-2 country codes available
| for internal use and non-commercial purposes free of
| charge.
|
| > This carries the implication (though not spelled out)
| that other uses are not permitted and that, therefore,
| there may be rights preventing further general use and
| reuse.
|
| Likewise, if ISO says they allow "free-of-charge use" of
| the database, it implies their permission and allowance
| is required to use it in the first place. This implies
| that if you embed the database to your app, it contains
| proprietary material by ISO. This limits your rights for
| example re-licensing it, as you can not re-license
| without consent from ISO, the copyright holder.
|
| Again - this is only a theoretical problem, yet the
| ambiguity is rather annoying to a pedant.
| xxpor wrote:
| The specific rules around copyright of facts is probably
| extremely country specific. The US tends to be on the
| more liberal/not copyrightable side here than Europe.
| dolmen wrote:
| Use Unicode CLDR data.
|
| https://cldr.unicode.org/
| jonatron wrote:
| Although I'm not a copyright laywer, I did previously
| work for an intellectual property services company. The
| country codes collection is a service they provide
| designed to make it easy to keep country codes up to
| date. This doesn't negate the "free-of-charge use" of the
| database. ISO appear to have clarified this almost 20
| years ago: http://xml.coverpages.org/ISOReaffirms.html ,
| and it looks like the situation hasn't changed.
|
| I don't see how your rights would be limited by including
| it in your app. You can just say the copyright to the ISO
| database belongs to ISO, but is free-of-charge, and the
| copyright to the code written by you belongs to you,
| which is not free of charge, or any license you wish.
|
| Edit: Because I can't reply - CC0, a public domain - like
| license was released in 2009, well after the
| clarification of their "free-of-charge use" license.
| vesinisa wrote:
| It would be _much_ better if they simply dedicated this
| database to the public domain.
|
| In the "clarification" they indeed seem to consider that
| the database is covered by their copyright, and any free
| use is subject to their continued benevolence:
|
| > However, ISO and its members do not charge for the use
| made of the codes contained in these standards, subject
| to this being consistent with ISO's copyright.
| dolmen wrote:
| Use Unicode CLDR data.
|
| License: https://unicode.org/copyright.html
| xxpor wrote:
| We're way off in speculation land here, but if CH law is
| like DE law, IIRC it's one of the countries that
| releasing to the public domain isn't really possible
| (which is why CC0 exists)
| unmole wrote:
| The UN can pretend that it's English. Just like how it
| pretends Taiwan isn't a country. There's no reason why we
| should go along with it.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Just like how it pretends Taiwan isn't a country
|
| That's because it really isn't. It really should be, but
| a) they don't really claim to be one (until recently they
| officially claimed they're the "one and only" China, same
| as the PRC) and according to polls most people there
| support that status quo; b) nobody of note recognises
| them to be.. anything really. As far as most of the
| world, including the UN, are concerned, Taiwan is the
| losers of the Chinese Civil war that have some limited
| exceptions (like performing at Olympics). Contrast this
| with Kosovo who claim to be an independent country and
| are somewhat recognised.
| [deleted]
| vesinisa wrote:
| Exactly. It's politics, which can take a completely new
| direction on a whim of a dictator or a regime change. But
| language, as used in practice, changes much less rapidly.
| stereolambda wrote:
| Yeah, it's strange and short-sighted (to me) that this
| kind of reasoning drives language changes. You really
| should want and treasure having an ages-weathered or
| weird exonym in the target language, preferably going
| back to Middle Ages or something. This suggests (on the
| perception level, that's what we're talking about) that
| you are a serious and established entity and your
| relations with the world go way, way back.
|
| Look up England, Germany (and maybe Holy See) here https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_names_in_vario...
| At least Slavic names for Germany even have negative
| undertones (something like 'mute people'). With changing
| the name you are trashing all that, and it's doubtful
| that it really changes much in the perception by itself.
| kgeist wrote:
| >One of the stated reasons is that Turkey is homophonic
| with 'turkey' (the thanksgiving meal), which further has
| a connotation of 'lousy'. This is 100% real, their
| current leadership is a bit strange
|
| It's not just a coincidence, the bird was named after
| Turkey because apparently they were first imported to
| England via the Middle East and so they were called
| "Turkey cocks". Other European languages call them
| literally "India cocks", due to a different import route.
| So it's a bit silly to change the official name of your
| country because a bird is named after it.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Other European languages call them literally "India
| cocks", due to a different import route.
|
| Hence "dinde" in French.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Oh, that's new information to me. Now I can not wait for
| Japan to finally change its name (perhaps to Nippon?) to
| avoid the terrible and vulgar connotation with the
| Japanese tit..
| kergonath wrote:
| Tits are gorgeous, though; turkeys are not.
| IlliOnato wrote:
| Wild turkeys are. At least in the eye of this beholder
| :-)
| ozgung wrote:
| > Other European languages call them literally "India
| cocks"
|
| Haha in Turkey (Turkiye) turkey is hindi and India is
| Hindistan, which can be translated as Turkeyland.
| kergonath wrote:
| > One of the stated reasons is that Turkey is homophonic
| with 'turkey'
|
| I would not even know how to pronounce "Turkiye", even if
| I were willing to.
| johnday wrote:
| This is a naive take which I find uber annoying. Maybe I'll
| tell my local cafe owner, Emily Bronte, about it.
| [deleted]
| the_biot wrote:
| I get your point, but the fact is these (except maybe for
| Bronte) commonly get spelled without the diacritics.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| That doesn't mean spelling them _with_ the diacritics
| makes them not English.
| zarzavat wrote:
| French was the official language of England for quite
| some time so English and French have a special
| relationship, and any of the French diacritics are
| acceptable in English. English also has native use of the
| umlaut mark for as diaeresis e.g. coordinate.
|
| For non-French diacritics, it is on a case-by-case basis.
| Most English speakers would accept n and even write it
| e.g "El Nino event". Nordic o is questionable but would
| be accepted in place names. Pho is right out.
| johnday wrote:
| > Most English speakers would accept n and even write it
| e.g "El Nino event"
|
| FWIW this may be true in the USA but in the UK and other
| non-NA English-speaking countries I don't think this
| holds.
| zarzavat wrote:
| You will definitely see jalapenos and such on UK food
| packaging. I just searched the bbc website for "jalapeno"
| and found this page [0] which uses both spellings (!). It
| also links to a page on "habanero" (sic) so yeah you can
| say that British familiarity with N is somewhat of a
| mixed bag.
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/jalapeno_chilli
| bowsamic wrote:
| It's a name, how can you tell if a name is "in English"?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It has a umlaut _and_ a dotted i in the uppercase version.
| Totally metal.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| I encourage you to not read much from the New Yorker then!
| int_19h wrote:
| It's the name that the country uses in its official
| communications in English, and expresses the desire to see
| the same name in English communications addressed to it.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| They're essentially throwing an identity tantrum on a
| global scale, while tip-toeing towards nationalism
| internally.
|
| This would be a laughable matter, were it not a sign of
| what's coming.
| toast0 wrote:
| In a world where we are asked to refer to people by their
| chosen names and pronouns rather than what they were
| asigned in the past, why should we not refer to a country
| by its chosen name? Especially if it's going through the
| proper channels to promulgate its name change?
| xxpor wrote:
| Ignoring the political implications of the question for a
| second, if nothing else when people ask to be referred to
| by a different name, their chosen name is usually at
| least reproducible on the keyboards in common use. Most
| people in the US would have absolutely no idea how to
| type U, let alone I. In addition, English speakers don't
| have [y], [c], or word-final [e] in their phoneme
| inventory.
| toast0 wrote:
| Yeah, I fully expect people without easy access to u with
| umlaut to just write u (regardless of case), and those
| without easy access to capital dotted i, to just write a
| dotless capital I. And the pronunciation will be brutal,
| at least for the first few decades, but change is a
| process.
| tomerv wrote:
| Follow-up question: what if other countries follow suit,
| especially ones that don't use a Latin-based alphabet? Egypt is
| formally called "jmhwry@ mSr l`rby@" in its native language -
| should that be recorded as the ISO Full name for EG?
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I think Egypt should be forced to revert to hieroglyphs.
| elashri wrote:
| Actually the name "Egypt" comes from the Greek
| pronunciation of the ancient Egyptian capital Memphis ( at
| least for most of the time it was).
|
| The current official name is "Junhuriyah Misr al-Arabiyah"
| which is Arab Republic of Egypt in English. This is not
| something special. a lot of countries have something like
| "republic of" in their names.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > a lot of countries have something like "republic of" in
| their names.
|
| Well, that depends. The name for China the administrative
| region is Zhong Hua Ren Min Gong He Guo , but I wouldn't
| really want to call that the name of the country. That's
| Zhong Guo , and if a regime change occurred, the name of
| the country would still be Zhong Guo , even if the name
| of the government were no longer Zhong Hua Ren Min Gong
| He Guo .
| jhbadger wrote:
| Yeah, numerous Communist regimes have/had either
| "People's" or "Democratic" (or in the case of North
| Korea, both) in their names. Normally when the Communist
| regime fell, this was removed,but the main part of the
| name preserved.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's not strictly a Soviet thing. When Ukraine declared
| its independence from Russia back in 1917, it was as
| "Ukrainian People's Republic", but it was definitely not
| communist or even particularly socialist. Ditto
| "Belarusian People's Republic". As I understand, in both
| cases the intent was to convey that it is a nation-state
| of the people that inhabit it, and not a part of a large
| empire anymore.
| zen_1 wrote:
| We'd need to touch up our school curriculum (well, even
| more than we already do).
| unmole wrote:
| > Basically, what's going on here?
|
| Inflation is ~75%. The Sultan wants distractions.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Right. Still much better than another one of the autocrats
| starting a war to distract from losing support amongst the
| "voters".
| sofixa wrote:
| Well he didn't start a war but certainly didn't stay far
| from it in Syria.
| leavemealone2 wrote:
| collegeburner wrote:
| leavemealone2 wrote:
| rcoveson wrote:
| This how HN talks about basically every administration of
| every country. No bigotry here (in GP's comment), just
| skepticism, cynicism, and distrust for authority.
| [deleted]
| tradertef wrote:
| Yep.
|
| Official value is 78.62% [1]
|
| Unofficial rate is 175.55% [2]
|
| [1] https://www.tcmb.gov.tr/wps/wcm/connect/TR/TCMB+TR/Main+M
| enu...
|
| [2] https://enagrup.org/
| calylex wrote:
| Aissen wrote:
| Nice, another marker to know the date when software libraries
| were last updated (a recent one is the Swaziland -> Eswatini name
| change in 2018).
|
| It can also be used as marker of the health of your opensource
| locale library.
| Asraelite wrote:
| The name change was to eSwatini, with a small e, but you wrote
| Eswatini. This is a trend I noticed in the months after the
| change - people started out using a small e but then gradually
| transitioned to a more normalized spelling. Now almost everyone
| writes Eswatini.
|
| I suspect the same will happen with Turkiye. For a while people
| will write it with u but then eventually it will become
| Turkiye, without the diaeresis.
| Aissen wrote:
| Very interesting, thanks.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Perhaps someone's finalyly going to figure out Huawei products
| are EOL on release date?
| throwaway2a02 wrote:
| Is there any other country that has a non-English ISO name?
|
| LE. There are a few, such as Cote d'Ivoire, Curacao etc. But
| those names have been used in practice much more frequently than
| their English names.
| dmurray wrote:
| Isn't Curacao the English name? English doesn't usually have
| the c character, but this is a loanword.
|
| I'd say if Curacao is a non-English name, then so is Botswana
| or Luxembourg and more than "a few" others.
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| Aland Islands is the only other one I could see
| savolai wrote:
| Also: It's an autonomous region, doesn't quite count as
| country afaik.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Correct, it's not a country but an autonomous region
| belonging to Finland.
|
| To make things not any easier, the only official language
| for Aland Islands is Swedish. The Swedish name is just
| Aland, nothing else. Nobody would call it Alands oar, well
| a tourist brochure might call it Alands orike (empire of
| islands) but that would sound ridiculous as an official
| name.
|
| So basically Aland Islands can't be anything but an English
| name. Maybe not a very clean one because it contains a non-
| English letter. So Turkiye is not without precedence.
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| It does appear on the ISO list though: https://en.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| usrusr wrote:
| If your place doesn't have a toponym in other languages it
| usually means that it hasn't been very important in history.
| The people who pushed for this change certainly feel quite the
| opposite about it, but to me it almost seems self-diminishing.
| "Our country is so insignificant it doesn't even have a name in
| languages that don't share our codepage"
| Parae wrote:
| Same goes with Cabo Verde, Costa Rica, Les Seychelles
| donatj wrote:
| I think what is meant is of letters of the English alphabet.
| English does not contain diacritics.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > English does not contain diacritics.
|
| Tell it to the New Yorker, where orthography like cooperate
| is required by official policy.
|
| As they would no doubt also be happy to explain, the
| diacritic there is not correctly referred to as an umlaut,
| as "umlaut" refers to the difference in pronunciation
| between e.g. German "u" and German "u", while the diacritic
| in cooperate doesn't change the pronunciation of any letter
| but instead exists to indicate to the reader that the two
| letter Os are to be pronounced separately rather than
| interpreted as a digraph (as in "troop").
|
| It is somewhat interesting to note that modern English
| speakers often feel that a mark for this purpose is needed,
| even though formally the orthography doesn't call for it -
| but they are much more likely to write "re-emerge" than to
| write "reemerge".
| donatj wrote:
| One publications strange style guide does not a language
| make.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It's not difficult to find diacritics in use outside the
| New Yorker, though generally not in that use. One
| exception would be the common spelling "naive".
| jcranmer wrote:
| You would be naive to think that, especially were you to
| write that on your resume. That English has no diacritics
| is a facade built up to escape the fact that our keyboards
| make no provision for them.
|
| (A little bit forced, but those are all English words I
| learned as properly having those appropriate diacritics,
| when I first learned those words back in grade school.)
| donatj wrote:
| Look those words up in the dictionary and they won't have
| the diacritics, except as an alternative spelling.
| They're loan words, and it's a stylistic choice.
|
| Ask 95% of laymen to write those words and there will be
| no diacritics, and the language is defined by its users.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Sure, let's look them up in a dictionary:
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resume
|
| resume (noun) variants: or resume
|
| Huh.
| count wrote:
| Nice of you to skip over the first, primary entry and
| select the secondary entry. The primary entry has no
| accent characters.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The first entry is for "resume", the verb, which is a
| different word than "resume", the noun. Note that none of
| the definitions provided for the verb "resume" would come
| close to working where someone intends to use "resume",
| the noun.
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| In my experience "Cape Verde" and "The Seyschelles" are more
| common in English. Martinique, like Costa Rica, is a loan
| word.
|
| The only recent ISO change I noticed was "the Ukraine" ->
| "Ukraine" (still heard the old form until a few months ago)
| and "Belarussia" -> "Belarus", both 30 years ago.
| em500 wrote:
| Fortunately the 2 and 3 letter abbreviations (Alpha-2 and
| Alpha-3) didn't change. Typically we'd use the abbreviations for
| analysis, feature encoding, etc. and the full name only for
| display and human interface use (like for autocompletion), where
| most people will probably be more comfortable with and continue
| to use the old names for a while.
| Gare wrote:
| In EU communications (including statistics), Greece is referred
| to by the "EL" abbreviation, instead of ISO Alpha-2 code "GR"
| (as all other countries are). It confused me a few days ago.
| zerocrates wrote:
| I wonder if the oddity here is really the ISO alpha-2: Spain
| and Germany get abbreviations based on their native-language
| names, but not Greece.
|
| But the standard 2-letter code for the Greek _language_ is
| "el."
|
| Obviously there are many other countries with abbreviations
| based on English and there's some decision-making related to
| avoiding conflicts, but it is a little odd. My first guess
| would be that the ISO country code logic went something like:
| prefer native names, _if_ they use the Latin alphabet.
| kijeda wrote:
| Are you sure its not in reference to "Greek" the language,
| rather than "Greece" the country? "el" is coding for Greek in
| ISO 639, IANA language subtags, etc.
| bloak wrote:
| It does seem to be EL for the country. See, for example:
| https://publications.europa.eu/code/pdf/370000en.htm
|
| EDIT: Perhaps it would have been nice if ISO 639 and ISO
| 3166 had been better coordinated so we didn't have cs_CZ,
| da_DK, sv_SE, ...
| akaij wrote:
| Similar to Switzerland (CH).
| usr1106 wrote:
| I don't see any similarity. CH/ch is the one and only
| abbreviation used about everywhere. Which other one would
| be used by whom? The letters might not be obvious to any
| speaker of a living language. But that's intentionally I
| understood. They have several national and egen more local
| languages, so they chose an abbreviation from Latin.
|
| GR/gr is ISO for Greece, but EU uses EL/el the previous
| commenter wrote. The latter seems to come from Greek
| language, although then spelled using the Latin alphabet
|
| How are those cases similar, except for it's not obvious to
| the average English speaker where some letters came from?
| gumby wrote:
| I don't understand: "CH" _is_ the ISO Alpha-2 code for
| Switzerland. What would be confusing to commenter Gare?
| dolmen wrote:
| "GB" vs "uk"
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Isn't the difference that UK includes Northern Ireland? So
| it's more of a difference than just using a different word
| for the same thing.
| manholio wrote:
| It seems absurd to try to find a "standardized" ISO country name,
| especially to enforce local names in English. Country names are
| both endonyms (for the inhabitants) and exonyms, the way certain
| cultures / linguistic areas refer to another country. How exactly
| do you transliterate Turkiye in Cyrillic or Mongolian script,
| where does the umlaut go? Why would you want that, instead of
| leaving Mongolians to use whatever traditional name they use for
| Turkey?
|
| And if Turkey can demand it, why not Ri Ben , Deutschland or lmrt
| l`rby@ lmtHd@ ?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Japan seems content with "Japan" for now but they have been
| trying to get English speakers to say Japanese names with the
| family name first recently, but it hasn't really caught on
| outside of state organs. Note this NHK article about the
| funeral of "Abe Shinzo" attended by current PM "Kishida Fumio."
| https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20220712_31/ (NHK is a
| state-run public broadcaster.)
|
| I do wonder why we say Chinese and Korean names in the proper
| "backwards" order but have historically flipped Japanese names.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| They missed the oldest trick in the book. Rename it to "AAA
| Turkiye" and make it easier for their citizens to sign up for
| things / get things delivered internationally.
| orlp wrote:
| Fun anecdote: in World of Warcraft (at least used to when I
| played/programmed them) addons load in alphabetical order and
| all operate and communicate in a single global Lua scope. The
| result is that library addon names start with an exclamation
| mark to be loaded first, and if a library is particularly
| fundamental, multiple exclamation marks so other libraries can
| depend on it.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| One of the internal test systems tennant names where I work
| is like this (as there is a handy screen that lists them in
| alpha order)
| tkgally wrote:
| I was curious how "Turkiye" is supposed to be pronounced in
| English. The following video offers one recommendation:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPPXvZQDlps
| mrtksn wrote:
| It sounds like the actors are having hard time pronouncing it,
| would you agree that it's hard for non-Turkish?
| tkgally wrote:
| Good point. Some of the actors seem to be native speakers of
| North American English and are trying to pronounce the last
| vowel of "Turkiye" with the vowel of "bed" or "sell." That
| vowel doesn't normally appear in word-final position in that
| dialect of English, so the actors have to make some effort to
| say it.
|
| Most English speakers trying to say "Turkiye" will, I
| suspect, use instead the vowel of "say" or "day."
| xvedejas wrote:
| I have wondered for a while how long until the English world
| starts calling Georgia "Sakartvelo", considering that some other
| languages have already made the change:
|
| https://www.rferl.org/a/lithuania-moves-change-official-name...
| mavhc wrote:
| Is the "the" really lower case?
| waqf wrote:
| It would be odd if it were not.
|
| Just as you would write "I went to the United States" not "I
| went to The United States".
|
| (Of course, lower case here means that you should use lower or
| upper case according to its position in the sentence; it
| doesn't mean forcibly overridden to lower case like
| e.e.cummings.)
| tomschwiha wrote:
| I visit The Queen.
| mkl wrote:
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings#Name_and_ca
| pita...:
|
| > The Chicago Manual of Style, which prescribes favoring non-
| standard capitalization of names in accordance with the
| bearer's strongly stated preference, notes "E. E. Cummings
| can be safely capitalized; it was one of his publishers, not
| he himself, who lowercased his name."
| gumby wrote:
| Yeah, the same clowns who decided that the proper noun the
| Internet should be capitalized the the same way as the
| adjective internet (as in internet protocols). I'm not sure
| I would consider their reasoning, well, reasonable.
| mkl wrote:
| Well there's other evidence in that section. I just
| picked something that was nicely quotable. The reasoning
| that the man himself usually capitalised his own name in
| the standard way so we should too is pretty hard to argue
| with.
| gumby wrote:
| You didn't need to justify your perfectly reasonable
| comment. I just hijacked your comment because I have an
| axe to grind.
| causi wrote:
| It's interesting to me what we do and don't decide to translate.
| Like if a name is too far away from English we'll just turn it
| into English but if it's close enough to English an English-
| speaker could basically figure out what it sounds like we don't
| translate it.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Even more awesome is that the capitalised version is TURKIYE, not
| TURKIYE, which is what you get if you call something like
| "Turkiye".ToUpper();
|
| It's going to be fun to watch developers wrap their heads around
| that one...
| Asooka wrote:
| That's horrible. The Turkish "i" is a never ending source of
| locale nightmares. I really wish they would pick a new letter
| for one of the sounds and use the standard "i" for the other.
| Like maybe use a diaresis.
| int_19h wrote:
| IPA uses i for the central sound.
| diegoperini wrote:
| I wish the word "read" is read as read instead of read in
| past tense form.
| IlliOnato wrote:
| Funny, there was a time when I was still learning English
| (well, it's a never-ending process, but still), and for
| quite some time I was using "red" as a past tense of
| "read"! No spell-checker ever corrected me :-) In fact no
| one did, I just noticed one day that it's not how it's
| spelled in books...
| korlja wrote:
| .ToUpper() is locale-dependent, so can only be used if the
| locale of the text in question is known. E.g. German ss
| capitalizes to SS, and .ToUpper().ToLower() should give you
| either 'ss' or 'ss' depending on what it was before. Always
| outputting 'ss' is okish and readable, but actually wrong.
|
| Blindly calling .ToUpper() on anything is a typical anglo-
| centric mistake. Just don't use .ToUpper(), shoutcase is ugly
| anyways ;)
|
| See also: one of the many "100 fallacies programmers assume
| about natural written language" documents or such.
| egeozcan wrote:
| > German ss capitalizes to SS, and .ToUpper().ToLower()
| should give you either 'ss' or 'ss' depending on what it was
| before
|
| As long as there is no unicode SS character, we are into the
| "what color are your bits" problem or tolower needs to be
| language _and_ word aware.
|
| In .NET the uppercase and lowercase functions are culture
| aware (with defaults to system settings, which breaks more
| software than you might think) but not word aware AFAIK.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > As long as there is no unicode SS character, we are into
| the "what color are your bits" problem or tolower needs to
| be language and word aware.
|
| It turns out there is such a unicode character -- Ss/ss --
| although based on other comments here it looks like it was
| added fairly recently.
|
| Upper/Lower case stuff just seems to be at an annoying
| intersection where it has cultural and also programming
| significance. Or at least, people will use toUpper when
| they really want some case-insensitive sortable version of
| the string.
|
| (based on some googling, probably localeCompare is the way
| to go in javascript at least).
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| .toUpper() is a quick and mostly effective way to normalise
| strings for comparison if you're not sure what case the two
| strings to compare are in (eg: one has been input by a user).
| Yes, it's a shortcut, and occasionally you'll end up with a
| miss, but it's good enough to work 99% of the time, and the
| alternative is a LOT of code and data changes to handle a
| very small proportion of cases.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Hmm I think you miss the point. In some programming
| environments (like C# and Java) .toUpper() is _always_
| incorrect in code unless you are displaying the resulting
| string in a UI, as it uses the "current locale", which is
| whatever the user has selected for the machine. When e.g.
| comparing strings case-insensitively, you should _always_
| explicitly specify the locale where the conversion should
| happen instead of relying on an external configuration
| variable.
|
| JavaScript actually seems to be the smart one here - its
| default .toUpperCase() uses the "locale-insensitive case
| mappings in the Unicode Character Database".
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| > the user has selected for the machine
|
| I don't think most Java and C# software is desktop apps?
| Surely in most cases it's the locale selected for the
| server or VM, which should be consistent?
|
| (I'm not saying it's good coding practice, mind you, but
| it probably ends up accidentally working in a lot of
| cases.)
| vesinisa wrote:
| You write like you can know how and where the code will
| get executed _in the future_. :) Do you think that the
| authors of Windows 95 ever imagined the system would one
| day get ported to an obscure subset of a functional
| scripting language (Asm.js variety of JavaScript), and
| get booted in a hyper-text browser running on a PDA
| device with internet connection (web browser on a
| smartphone)? Yet - here we are: https://win95.ajf.me/
|
| > I'm not saying it's good coding practice, mind you, but
| it probably ends up accidentally working in most cases
|
| Fully agree. It's still bad practice and I high-five
| every linter that automatically flags it.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| I did indeed. Thanks - yes, I was referring to
| JavaScript's .toUpperCase(), silly oversight and
| assumption on my side.
|
| Thanks for the correction!
| bbu wrote:
| Only sz should use ss. Ss stays ss even in German-german.
| Switzerland got rid of the sz/ss distinction a long time ago.
| So you need to be culture and word aware to do it ,,right".
| korlja wrote:
| 'sz' for 'ss' is sometimes used to make things roundtrip-
| proof in capslock, e.g. on military stencils. HTML calls it
| 'szlig'. Also, some use "Esszet" as the name of the
| character. But all are wrong in that ss isn't a ligature of
| s and z, it is a ligature of s and s. The shape of the
| character stems from the fact that in fractur writing and
| even some grotesk fonts, 's' at the end of a word was
| written 's', while 's' within a word was written 's'. Thus
| the end of a word like Fuss was written Fuss, giving a
| ligature of Fuss. No 'z' anywhere.
| seszett wrote:
| > _some use "Esszet" as the name of the character_
|
| I believe the actual name is _Eszett_.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Only "wrong" in light of current usage, but not
| historically.
|
| By this measure, the English name of "W" would be wrong
| because it's not actually a "double-U" but a "double-V".
| But at the time of the letter's formation, U and V were
| not yet separate letters.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W
| jfk13 wrote:
| The Swedes get this "right", and call it ['dob:el,ve:].
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Oh wow, didn't know that!
| samatman wrote:
| French as well, although the elegance gained is quickly
| tarnished by calling y "Greek i".
| mzs wrote:
| I always thought that German z used to look something
| between & z. Z looks pretty close so sz became ss but
| Latin transliteration rules were ss instead. At least
| that's what I was taught in German class.
| kmm wrote:
| Originally ss arose as a ligature of s and z, or rather s
| and Z. In many older texts, or even current fonts, the
| second part of the ligature is indisputably a long-tailed
| Z
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F
| underwater wrote:
| You make a good case (ha!). What if toUpper() and toLower()
| were omitted from standard libraries? Usually they are used,
| incorrectly, to do something like string comparison, which
| could be better served by a more specific method.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Blindly calling .ToUpper() on anything is a typical anglo-
| centric mistake._
|
| Yes, one that you might make if you were for example, trying
| to make English text uppercase. Which is why it would be daft
| for anyone to suggest that their country has two different
| English spellings depending on the character case.
| AdrianoKF wrote:
| Small nitpick: uppercase Ss was added to Unicode 5.1 in 2007
| (https://unicode-table.com/en/1E9E/) and is considered
| correct German orthography since 2017 (see SS25 E3 in
| https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/rechtschreibung/6180#par25E3)
| korlja wrote:
| That is correct and solves the roundtrip-problem (in this
| case and language). But uppercase 'Ss' is just an
| additional option at the discretion of the writer, the
| recommended variant continues to be 'SS'.
| usr1106 wrote:
| How often do you see the new letter in German everyday
| life? Despite being German myself I don't visit Germany
| that often these days, I still read a couple of German
| publications regularly. I have never seen the new letter
| outside of discussions by software people about character
| handling.
| ttepasse wrote:
| I do sometimes, but I'm rather sensitive for the Ss
| issue: My last name contains an ss and uppercasing would
| either mean keeping the ss lowercase - the
| Personalausweis does that (+) and it looks ugly -- or
| doing the ss - SS transformation which is somewhat
| forbidden in identity documents; a name must be exact.
| Hence, someday in the future, hopefully, the Ss. While
| personal names were a major motivation for the inclusion
| of the Ss into Unicode, I'm always happy to see it in the
| wild in press or book titles or such.
|
| + Although it's Germany and of course there exists an
| obscure Verwaltungsvorschrift according to which you can
| write the non-machine readable field of the
| Personalausweis/Pass in lowercase, exactly for this use
| case. I didn't know that last time but I fully intend to
| make some poor civil servants life a slight hell the next
| time I have to renew.
| gumby wrote:
| I assumed it was added for shop signs and product
| packaging (I.e. as a gimmick).
|
| Speaking of surviving Fraktur ligatures, I'm sorry that a
| couple of others like tz didn't make it to Roman. It
| makes poor ss appear lonely.
| AdrianoKF wrote:
| I was actually wondering if the driving factor is legal
| documents. ID cards show names in all-caps letters, which
| creates the dilemma that your ID might not show your
| actual name (notwithstanding international standards for
| travel documents that prescribe transliteration of non-
| latin characters; see ICAO Doc 9303 Part 3, section 6 [0]
| for examples)
|
| [0]: https://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p3_
| cons_en....
| gumby wrote:
| That's a good theory, especially as section 3.1 of that
| ICAO document explicitly permits the use of ss.
|
| Bringing the thread back to the topic of this comment
| section: the ICAO document also calls the digits
| 0123456789 "Arabic" even though their shapes are closer
| to the original Hindi (Devanagari) forms than to actual
| Arabic digits -- another "Hindi/Turkey" situation
| egeozcan wrote:
| Sometimes you see people write like this or THIS when they are
| unused to the Turkish keyboard and it creates a lot of problems
| for some software, even crashes (to upper and back to lower is
| not the same word!).
| dolmen wrote:
| Developers should just use Unicode CLDR data.
|
| https://cldr.unicode.org/
|
| https://unicode-org.github.io/cldr-staging/charts/latest/sum...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| nerdponx wrote:
| But `"turkiye".upper()` works correctly, at least in Python
| 3.9.
|
| Interestingly, `"turkiye".title()` does _not_ work correctly,
| returning `"TurkiYe"`, presumably because the "title-case"
| algorithm incorrectly detects \xcc\x87 as punctuation. Not sure
| if this has been fixed in 3.10 or 3.11.
| Python 3.9.13 (main, May 24 2022, 21:13:51) [Clang
| 13.1.6 (clang-1316.0.21.2)] on darwin Type "help",
| "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
| >>> s = 'TURKIYE' >>> s.lower() 'turkiye'
| >>> s.lower().upper() 'TURKIYE' >>>
| s.lower().title() 'TurkiYe' >>>
| s.lower().encode() b't\xc3\xbcrki\xcc\x87ye
|
| Edit: It turns out that this behavior is documented [0], and
| the more-correct routine is `string.capwords` [1]:
|
| > The algorithm uses a simple language-independent definition
| of a word as groups of consecutive letters. The definition
| works in many contexts but it means that apostrophes in
| contractions and possessives form word boundaries, which may
| not be the desired result ... The string.capwords() function
| does not have this problem, as it splits words on spaces only.
|
| [0]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.title
|
| [1]:
| https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html#string.capword...
| Bedon292 wrote:
| Compared this vs another comment and its interesting. Pulled
| the strings directly from the ISO website. I wonder if the
| 'i' in the lower case one is supposed to be special and not
| ASCII? Python 3.8.10 (default, Mar 15 2022,
| 12:22:08) [GCC 9.4.0] on linux Type "help",
| "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
| >>> short_name_lower = "Turkiye" >>> short_name =
| "TURKIYE" >>> short_name.encode() ## The U and I are
| UTF-8 chars b'T\xc3\x9cRK\xc4\xb0YE' >>>
| short_name_lower.encode() ## Note only the u is special, i
| is just ASCII b'T\xc3\xbcrkiye' >>>
| short_name.lower() 'turkiye' >>>
| short_name_lower.lower() 'turkiye' >>>
| short_name.lower() == short_name_lower.lower() ## Looks the
| same, but it isn't False >>>
| short_name.lower().encode() ## The i has extra \xcc\x87 here
| b't\xc3\xbcrki\xcc\x87ye' >>>
| short_name_lower.lower().encode() ## The i doesn't have the
| extra here b't\xc3\xbcrkiye' >>>
| short_name_lower.upper().encode() ## So this is wrong too,
| since its just an ASCII i to start b'T\xc3\x9cRKIYE'
|
| Edit: Formatting
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| It's apparently a locale-specific capitalization rule:
| https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/problematic-case-
| conv...
|
| > In Turkish, the character "i" becomes "I" when
| capitalized, while the "i" (a Turkish-specific character)
| becomes "I" (which looks just like the Latin upper case
| "I").
|
| > The out-of-the-box capitalization method implemented by
| developers or by localization tools by default is often the
| standard 'toUpper()', which doesn't follow language-
| specific rules and will convert the "i" into an "I". As for
| the lower case "i", it will simply fail to capitalize it at
| all. This will result in a very strange looking text in the
| game with uncapitalized characters and wrongly capitalized
| ones.
| lmkg wrote:
| On my browsers (both Vivaldi and Safari, on MacOS), your
| string "turkiye" is rendered with two dots over the i
| (stacked vertically). I don't know if this is what you
| intended, but it doesn't seem to me as the correct lowercase
| form. But I'll defer to someone more versed in the local
| customs.
| Bedon292 wrote:
| Very interesting. On Windows in Chrome its just an i for
| me, but in Firefox its showing an extra dot between iy. But
| in my comment I can't get that to show up even in Firefox.
| int_19h wrote:
| This might actually be a font thing, depending on whether
| any given font provides a precomposed version of "i" +
| "combining dot above" (and rendering it as just "i") or
| not.
| mzs wrote:
| It's not _i_ , it's _i_. Also capwords only capitalizes the
| first letter in each word. Here it 's a bandaid. For locale-
| aware case conversions in python use ICU:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32076177
| nemoniac wrote:
| In Python: >>> "Turkiye".upper()
| 'TURKIYE' >>> import locale
| >>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "tr_TR.UTF-8")
| 'tr_TR.UTF-8' >>> "Turkiye".upper()
| 'TURKIYE' # Expect "TURKIYE" >>>
| locale.resetlocale()
| Bedon292 wrote:
| Definitely odd, I did a bit more checking in another comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32070549
| gumby wrote:
| Thank you for calling locale.resetlocale() before exiting.
| wyldfire wrote:
| Maybe there should be a context manager?
| nerdponx wrote:
| Absolutely. It's not that hard to write your own though:
| import locale from contextlib import
| contextmanager @contextmanager def
| use_locale(*args, **kwargs):
| locale.setlocale(*args, **kwargs) yield
| locale.resetlocale()
|
| Contextlib is one of the under-appreciated gems in
| Python: https://docs.python.org/3/library/contextlib.html
| #contextlib...
| catskul2 wrote:
| > Maybe there should be a context manager?
|
| Even despite the:
|
| > Absolutely.
|
| My absolute least favorite response to this is:
|
| > It's not that hard to write your own though:
| nerdponx wrote:
| The alternative is trying to get one merged into the
| standard library. At least writing your own is better
| than not having one!
| kzrdude wrote:
| Does not really help parallel code
| dolmen wrote:
| Use a global lock in the context manager.
|
| Or use a programming language that doesn't rely on libc
| for locales.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| Well dang: https://docs.python.org/3.12/library/locale.html
|
| > There is no way to perform case conversions and character
| classifications according to the locale. For (Unicode) text
| strings these are done according to the character value only,
| while for byte strings, the conversions and classifications
| are done according to the ASCII value of the byte, and bytes
| whose high bit is set (i.e., non-ASCII bytes) are never
| converted or considered part of a character class such as
| letter or whitespace.
| mzs wrote:
| I actually like that python doesn't do locale aware case
| conversions. You can use ICU* for that, though it shows
| more warts (like the _i_ in _republic_ and that you have to
| handle Chinese banknotes differently as well):
| % env - LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 PATH="$PATH" python3
| Python 3.8.12 (default, Nov 13 2021, 10:49:08)
| [Clang 11.0.3 (clang-1103.0.32.62)] on darwin Type
| "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
| information. >>> from icu import UnicodeString,
| Locale >>> s = b'the Republic of T\xc3\xbcrkiye'
| >>> s = s.decode() >>> s 'the Republic of
| Turkiye' >>> lc = Locale("TR") >>> s =
| UnicodeString(s) >>> s <UnicodeString: 'the
| Republic of Turkiye'> >>> s = s.toUpper(lc) >>>
| s <UnicodeString: 'THE REPUBLIC OF TURKIYE'>
| >>> s = str(s) >>> s 'THE REPUBLIC OF TURKIYE'
| >>> s.encode() b'THE REPUBL\xc4\xb0C OF
| T\xc3\x9cRK\xc4\xb0YE' >>> s = UnicodeString(s)
| >>> lc = Locale("CN") >>> s = s.toLower(lc) >>>
| s <UnicodeString: 'the republic of turkiye'>
| >>> s = 'Yi ,Er ,Can ,Si ,Wu ,Lu ,Qi ,Ba ,Jiu ,Shi ,Bai
| ,Qian ,Wan ' >>> s.encode() b'\xe5\xa3\xb9,\xe8
| \xb2\xb3,\xe5\x8f\x83,\xe8\x82\x86,\xe4\xbc\x8d,\xe9\x99\xb
| 8,\xe6\x9f\x92,\xe6\x8d\x8c,\xe7\x8e\x96,\xe6\x8b\xbe,\xe4\
| xbd\xb0,\xe4\xbb\x9f,\xe8\x90\xac' >>> s =
| UnicodeString(s) >>> s <UnicodeString: 'Yi ,Er
| ,Can ,Si ,Wu ,Lu ,Qi ,Ba ,Jiu ,Shi ,Bai ,Qian ,Wan '>
| >>> s = s.toLower(lc) >>> s <UnicodeString: 'Yi
| ,Er ,Can ,Si ,Wu ,Lu ,Qi ,Ba ,Jiu ,Shi ,Bai ,Qian ,Wan '>
|
| * https://pypi.org/project/PyICU/
| twawaaay wrote:
| > It's going to be fun to watch developers wrap their heads
| around that one...
|
| No, it will not. Nobody gives a damn. Nobody will implement it.
|
| I am still trying to get people to correctly denote beginning
| and end of a day (much more useful, practical). Everybody I
| work with seems to be bent on using 23:59:59 as the end of the
| day rather than start of next day. Explaining that there is no
| 1s delay between end of one day and start of the next isn't
| helping either.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Woah woah woah. Some of us don't implement things because
| marketing/business/the client/management doesn't care, not
| because we don't care.
|
| Some of use have moved beyond "falsehoods programmers believe
| about X" to "falsehoods the people in charge believe about
| X."
| mort96 wrote:
| Huh, but there is no 1 second gap between 23:59:59 and
| 00:00:00. The time is 23:59:59 for a whole second, and then
| once that second is done, the time is 00:00:00 the next day.
| tommit wrote:
| That's how I would interpret it as well. It gets easier to
| imagine when we put in milliseconds. Why would 23:59:59.456
| already be the following day?
| whoopdedo wrote:
| And then there are leap seconds.
| progval wrote:
| It depends whether you interpret "23:59:59" as being an
| instant (1 second before the end of most days) or a
| duration (the last second of most days).
|
| 23:59:59.500 is after 23:59:59 when interpreted as an
| instant, but it is part of 23:59:59 as a duration.
| throwaway294566 wrote:
| Thats why the day doesn't end at the instant of 23:59:59,
| nor does it end at 23:59:60 (if there is a leap second).
| It actually ends at 24:00:00. Which is the same instant
| in time as 00:00:00 of the following day. Every
| conforming implementation of ISO 8601 should know about
| that. And all software should conform to ISO 8601.
| input_sh wrote:
| People seriously overestimate how many websites support Latin
| Extended-A to even be able to display u or I.
|
| As someone whose last name contains a character from the same
| Unicode subset (c), it's often a white square or just flat-
| out removed from my last name completely.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Sit on my lap youngling, and I will tell you tales of i18n
| horror... and I'm from an English-speaking country!
|
| A _realistic_ scenario is an Australian writing French poetry
| while on holidays in Turkey. Now you have an OS GUI with en-
| GB as the language, licensing and date /number formatting as
| per the AU region, French spelling dictionary, a US-101
| keyboard layout, Turkey as the location, and GMT+3 as the
| time zone.
|
| It's a rare piece of software that can handle this. Few
| vendors have staff that have even heard of such exotic
| places.
|
| There are still people... many people... that deny the
| existence of places outside of the United States of America.
| Such filthy, heathen locations are surely a thing of myth, or
| legend!
|
| Places where dates are formatted with the days before the
| month, followed by the year in some sort of weird, unnatural
| order.
|
| Nations that have fallen into the trap of some sort of mass
| hallucination, or shared dream of common measurement units.
| Some sort of... _metric_ , for space, time, and matter. Maybe
| they've been watching too much Star Trek!
|
| Multicultural countries where strange unions of races are
| commonplace, and couples may want to watch Netflix in one
| language, but have subtitles in a different language. Neither
| of which are English for the hearing-impaired! Surely, nobody
| but the _deaf_ are unable to comprehend the universal English
| language! Not to mention that such taboo couplings are,
| thankfully, still banned on this stream of holy virtue and
| shall not be permitted by the data scientists that have
| declared: _" Your union is a statistically negligible!"_
| rconti wrote:
| Can't we use our USA-centrism (centricity?) to make the
| behavior of the country drop-down just a little bit better?
| Surely I'm not the only one burdened with having to scroll
| past a hundred of these .. ahem.. OTHER... countries.. to
| find "United States of America".
|
| Yes, I could begin typing "Unite.." but we all know that
| ends up on United Arab Emirates, and then when I continue
| on to "...d Sta..." and it doesn't work, only to find out
| _this_ country picker uses "USA" or something similar so
| it breaks the autocomplete muscle memory.
|
| Clearly, if we're the center of the known universe, we
| could use our power to make it a little easier to enter my
| billing and shipping information.
| int_19h wrote:
| "Airstrip 1"?
| Taniwha wrote:
| That just pisses off everyone else on the planet - plus
| the other countries in the Americas that consist of
| united states, and who equally consider themselves
| "American" much as French people are "European"
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _There are still people... many people... that deny the
| existence of places outside of the United States of
| America._
|
| Two fun anecdotes my mother has recounted when we were all
| in Denver for ~5 months in Denver 1996:
|
| 1. Asked where we were from on one occasion (after hearing
| an Australian accent): "Australia." Response: "Oh, did you
| come by bus?" Now it is possible that there was a
| misunderstanding there, but mum doesn't think so.
|
| 2. Of those that didn't already _know_ , only one person
| successfully identified where we were from, _and that
| person was deaf_. (It's fascinating to try something like
| this on video without audio where there's nothing obvious
| static to identify nationality: I find I can identify both
| Australian and American correctly at a rate considerably
| better than random, without ever having made a study of
| it.)
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Huh? 23:59:59 is neither, it's one second early.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I think that's the point, people insist on using 23:59:59
| as end of day instead of the correct 24:00:00 (which
| happens to be the same instant as 00:00:00 of the next day,
| since there's no gap between days)
| [deleted]
| twawaaay wrote:
| My working theory on why this happens is that there are
| two different models and people sometimes have problem
| choosing the correct one.
|
| When you say "Thursday" you mean entire 24h period. It is
| not a point in time, it is a label for a span of time.
|
| But when you say "1 pm" you don't mean an entire hour,
| you mean a point in time that is more or less precisely
| 1pm.
|
| It seems people extend the first model to a lot of cases
| where it is not correct. And so for many people their
| mental model of 23:59:59 is a label for a span of time
| that is one second in length.
|
| If your model is that a day consists of 86400 "seconds",
| each second being a span of time of length of one second
| with a label like 12:37:28, then 23:59:59 is the last
| second of the day and 00:00:00 is the first second of the
| next day.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Working with spans is fraught with peril, though. It
| invites off-by-one errors.
|
| If there's one person in the queue to the checkout, then
| span-wise, that person is the start of the queue and the
| end of the queue. But if the start and end are the same,
| what is the length of the queue?
|
| (If you still insist it's one, you'll not be able to
| answer the question where the start and end of an empty
| queue is. There is no first or last person!)
| jl6 wrote:
| Fun fact, ISO 8601 used to allow 24:00:00 notation (as a
| synonym of 00:00:00), but in the latest version of the
| standard it does not.
| emsixteen wrote:
| Honest question, what are you supposed to do instead?
| twawaaay wrote:
| You add 1 day (not 24 hours) to beginning of day. If you
| have a good library it should handle it correctly.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| > 1 day (not 24 hours)
|
| Just to spell it out, some days have 25 hours or 23 hours
| due to daylight savings, or 24 hours and 1 second because
| of leap seconds, etc.
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| Not understanding this complaint.
|
| ```TSQL select cast('2022-07-12 24:00:00' as datetime)
| ``` >>> The conversion of a varchar data type to a
| datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value.
|
| ```python from datetime import datetime d: datetime =
| datetime(2022, 7, 12, 24, 0, 0) ``` >>> ValueError: hour
| must be in 0..23
| jhgb wrote:
| Well you clearly can't use 24:00:00 _universally_ as the
| end of your day because sometimes there 's a 24:00:01 on
| some days?
| throwaway294566 wrote:
| You can. The leap second is always 23:59:60
| jhgb wrote:
| Yep, I may have forgotten about that. Shame on me.
| inkeddeveloper wrote:
| Same. Developers have far greater problems.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I still have to see any computer system that implements leap
| seconds correctly (adding a 60th second, instead of reversing
| time or smearing time).
| bombcar wrote:
| Linux apparently did it correctly - the last time it
| happened we watched the kernel log and cheered when it said
| :60
| behnamoh wrote:
| It's crazy to assume people will use umlauts in URLs. As far as
| internet users are concerned, TURKIYE is turkiye, end of story.
|
| PS. It's much easier to type umlauts on Mac. Just hold 'u' to
| see the variants.
| jws wrote:
| As a Mac user from the beginning I was about to say "that's
| an iPad, not a Mac", but lo and behold!
|
| On a Mac now the alphabetic and digit keys do not autorepeat
| when held but instead pop up little menus of variants.
| Shifted alphabetic keys get different variants appropriate to
| their letter. Sadly for TURKIYE the single dot capital "i" is
| not one of them.
|
| At least for my settings, none of the digits get options, nor
| do they autorepeat.
|
| A completely useful overloading of "long press" of a keyboard
| key, but completely undiscoverable unless you make long
| strings of "vvvvvvvvv" as a pointer or some such, then you
| get a disappointment instead of what you wanted, but you will
| be enlightened.
| spc476 wrote:
| Not everywhere. In Terminal, the letters just repeat.
| [deleted]
| sebazzz wrote:
| That's complicated:
| "Turkiye".ToUpperInvariant() "Turkiye".ToUpper()
|
| TURKIYE "Turkiye".ToUpper([System.Globalizati
| on.CultureInfo]::GetCultureInfo("tr-TR"))
|
| TURKIYE
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I just got this... > "Turkiye".capitalize()
| UniquenessError("Ankara is already the capital")
| eesmith wrote:
| Something's wrong with your implementation. That shouldn't
| be a uniqueness constraint as a country may have multiple
| capitals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_w
| ith_multipl...
|
| Also, "Nauru".capitalize() should succeed as it has no
| official capital.
|
| (tongue firmly in cheek ;)
| zinekeller wrote:
| Can someone help me? Is this an error?
| "Switzerland".capitalize() "HELVETICA"
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I think you don't have the right fonts installed.
| throw0101a wrote:
| Switzerland has four official languages, with the English
| word "Switzerland" having a particular translation to
| each one. But if you choose a single official name in one
| of those languages, it is not fair to the others, so in
| addition an official name in each language, they have an
| official in a 'neutral' language: Latin.
|
| > _Due to its linguistic diversity, Switzerland is known
| by a variety of native names: Schweiz ['SvaIts]
| (German);[note 5] Suisse [sYis(@)] (French); Svizzera
| ['zvittsera] (Italian); and Svizra ['Zvi:tsra, 'Zvi:tsRa]
| (Romansh).[note 6] On coins and stamps, the Latin name,
| Confoederatio Helvetica - frequently shortened to
| "Helvetia" - is used instead of the four national
| languages._
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland
|
| That's also why the ccTLD of Switzerland is .ch.
|
| What you're seeing may be an 'artifact' of that.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Yeah lots of people confuse that domain for China.
| eesmith wrote:
| Odd. I get: "Switzerland".capitalize()
| EDGENOSSENSAFT
|
| Maybe my locale is messed up?
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Are you in china? That looks like Canton-ese.
| eesmith wrote:
| It's a thread of jokes. devoutsalsa started with a joke
| mixing the two meanings of "capital" using a fake
| example. I joked that "UniquenessError" isn't the right
| error, as some countries have more than one capital and
| two countries have no official capital.
|
| One of those two is Switzerland, which has the official
| Latin name "Confoederatio Helvetica", leading zinekeller
| joke that the capital form was "HELVETICA". See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Switzerland .
|
| I pretended my implementation of that non-extent
| programming language generated "Eidgenossenschaft", see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidgenossenschaft . As
| that's a German word, I decided to use a blackletter
| typeface, specifically, the Fraktur in Unicode which is
| meant to encode mathematical alphanumeric symbols, then
| imply that my locale the reason I got a German word.
| roxymusic1973 wrote:
| ...and Switzerland is divided into cantons :)
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| It looks like Fraktur to me.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur
| eesmith wrote:
| Got it in one.
| gpmcadam wrote:
| In JavaScript, you can use
| `String.prototype.toLocaleUpperCase()` >
| 'Turkiye'.toLocaleUpperCase('TR') 'TURKIYE'
|
| [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
| arianvanp wrote:
| In JavaScript:
| "Turkiye".toLocaleUpperCase("tr-TR") 'TURKIYE'
| dhosek wrote:
| Reminds me of the bug in PHP where they used a call to
| toUpper without specifying locale to enable their case
| insensitivity and if your locale was Turkey, you couldn't
| call any library calls with an i in them if you typed them in
| lowercase because, e.g., call to phpinfo() would get case-
| folded into PHPINFO().
| GaelFG wrote:
| I find it funny, Turkey was aldready a good test case for
| handling international users data :), I spend some hours on a
| bug in json with integer parsing of some users integer inputs
| in rares cases.
|
| It was because of the way they write/parse integer using dots
| as separators. (Yes, the real problem was me having forgot to
| force server and client to use the same locale settings :) )
|
| An old article talking of it :
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-turkey/
| seydor wrote:
| > watch developers wrap their heads
|
| <img src="/img/turkiye.gif" alt="Turkey" />
| jakub_g wrote:
| (if you're curious: Turkish has dotted and dotless "i":
| https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I)
| nailer wrote:
| Keep in mind most people in 'Czechia' (the new official name for
| what we all call the Czech Republic) still prefer 'the Czech
| Republic'.
| robga wrote:
| The UK government is changing the full name ('State Title') only,
| not the short name ('Country Name'). The UK gov follows the
| standards set by the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names
| for British Official Use. This body includes the BBC, Royal
| Geographical Society, etc. So I suppose the BBC will continue to
| use Turkey.
|
| "Turkey; Republic of Turkey changed to Turkey; Republic of
| Turkiye"
|
| https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/country-names/cou...
|
| https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/the-permanent-committee...
|
| There is the precedent of Burma/Myanmar, "Country name remains
| Burma reflecting common British English usage". Similarly for
| Cabo Verde, "Cape Verde had circulated a request for this form to
| be used, though UK has retained the common English usage for the
| country name".
|
| However, it did recently change Swaziland to Eswatini and I know
| which one I'd vote for as being common usage.
|
| The ISO codes are not always adopted verbatim. e.g. The UK gov
| list does not include Taiwan. ISO plays both sides, giving it a
| country code but calling it a province of China. On the other
| hand the UK does include Kosovo which is not an ISO country but
| is recognised as one by approx 50% of nations including the UK.
|
| Other countries have similar national naming committees to the
| UK's PCGN, you can see a list here
| https://unstats.un.org/unsd/ungegn/nna/nna-committees/
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > There is the precedent of Burma/Myanmar, "Country name
| remains Burma reflecting common British English usage".
|
| Myanmar has the much bigger problem that it has no adjectival
| form, _requiring_ even the most politically correct people to
| use "Burmese".
|
| (Technically, that's not true - the official adjectival form,
| according to Myanmar, should be "Myanma". Good luck getting
| English speakers to understand that.)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Technically, that's not true - the official adjectival
| form, according to Myanmar, should be "Myanma". Good luck
| getting English speakers to understand that.
|
| How is that any harder than Afghanistan => Afghan.
| [deleted]
| plorg wrote:
| Lots of people replying based on what sound like personal
| preferences or language biases; I'm guessing the biggest
| reason, if this is accurate, is that no one ever asks and
| GP assumes no one will.
| schoen wrote:
| I can think of two ways:
|
| First, many English-speakers are familiar with -stan, which
| is used in seven different country names, plus some region
| names.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-stan
|
| For most of these, you can get an ethnonym or demonym by
| removing -stan or -istan.
|
| Second, the -ar in particular has a lot of trouble with
| non-rhotic English accents, where "Myanmar" might _already_
| be pronounced the same as "Myanma"!
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Second, the -ar in particular has a lot of trouble with
| non-rhotic English accents, where "Myanmar" might
| _already_ be pronounced the same as "Myanma"!
|
| It's supposed to be. Both names, "Burma" and "Myanmar",
| are formed under the assumption that your English
| pronunciation is non-rhotic.
|
| The same is true of the common Korean surname "Park",
| which does not contain any R-like sound. British
| spellings of foreign words really cause tremendous damage
| to the pronunciations used by rhotic speakers.
| shaftoe wrote:
| Wait, so it's not "Berm-uh" and "My-ahn-mar" ?
| schoen wrote:
| I didn't realize this, but Wikipedia says
|
| > In Burmese, the pronunciation depends on the register
| used and is either Bama (pronounced [b@ma]) or Myamah
| (pronounced [mj@ma]).
|
| That is, there is originally no R sound in either word in
| Burmese, as thaumasiotes clarified.
| TillE wrote:
| > British spellings of foreign words really cause
| tremendous damage to the pronunciations used by rhotic
| speakers.
|
| It's such a strange thing to use an 'r' to modify the
| sound of the preceding vowel, and it's not even as if
| it's 100% consistent, because all English is a mess.
|
| This expectation also leads to comical situations like
| the typical British pronunciation of "pasta". I guess the
| Italians should have spelled it parsta.
| ncmncm wrote:
| For fun, get your English-accented acquaintances to
| pronounce "drawing".
|
| Officially, the Queen's English says this is pronounced
| "drawing". But most Brits feel compelled to insert an R,
| "drawRing".
|
| It is much like Americans saying "Mel and I", in object
| context, e.g. "She accused Mel and I", where "Mel and me"
| would have been right.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > But most Brits feel compelled to insert an R,
| "drawRing".
|
| They really are compelled to insert an R there. That is
| one of the phonological rules of their variety of
| English; it's how you avoid running one vowel into
| another vowel.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R
|
| Complaining about this is the equivalent of complaining
| about how Americans "feel" compelled to insert a vowel
| into the name Gbagbo, pronouncing it guh-bagbo. They
| don't just feel compelled; that is a genuine requirement
| of their language.
|
| It is not at all similar to any variation on "Mel and I",
| which is an artificial rule that English speakers must be
| taught in school. The form people use naturally is "me
| and Mel".
| catskul2 wrote:
| > It is much like Americans saying "Mel and I", in object
| context, e.g. "She accused Mel and I", where "Mel and me"
| would have been right. ...
|
| > It is not at all similar to any variation on "Mel and
| I", which is an artificial rule that English speakers
| must be taught in school. The form people use naturally
| is "me and Mel".
|
| I think you're misunderstanding here. There's no
| situation where "she accused (Mel and) I" works. It's not
| taught in school. It happens because of people "hyper
| correcting" to match the inverted sentence. "(Mel and) I
| accused her" which they get corrected to use by the
| teacher when they say "(Mel and) me accused her".
| ncmncm wrote:
| No. If you had been correct, there would have been no
| reason to post what I did. But you are 100% wrong on both
| counts, and I did. (For amusement, see _rndmio_ 's
| comment above.)
| schoen wrote:
| I think you're referring to
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection
|
| while thaumasiotes is referring to
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics
|
| There are examples in the hypercorrection article about
| people adding an /h-/ in a _very_ similar situation, so
| what you describe clearly can happen. But are you sure
| that the R example falls into that category?
|
| It seems to be a distinction about how conscious the
| change is, or at what layer of language it happens. Isn't
| that an empirical question that could be tested?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Strictly speaking, the masses adopting rhotic
| pronunciation was, originally, an effort at mimicking a
| privileged-class affectation. The extra "R" in "drawRing"
| did not mimic anything, though, but seemed required by
| the imperfectly deduced rule. Those in actual contact
| with the privileged class had plenty of examples to, er*,
| draw upon, denied to those without.
|
| Class markers in speech are always a moving target, a
| sort of low-grade arms race: low stakes for the upper
| class, high stakes for lower.
|
| So, pronouncing it "drawRing" is a lower-class marker,
| similar in a way to "aks" for "ask" in American English.
|
| As always, all of these pronunciations are legitimate and
| produce no misunderstanding.
|
| [*] "er" is pronounced "uh" or "eh", rhotically.
| rndmio wrote:
| > Officially, the Queen's English says this is pronounced
| "drawing". But most Brits feel compelled to insert an R,
| "drawRing".
|
| Am British, literally no one I know personally puts an
| extra R in when pronouncing drawing. I have heard it said
| that way before but you certainly couldn't say that
| "most" Brits do it.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Apparently, "most" of some poorly characterized strata of
| Brits.
|
| I am amused that your sibling comment insists "drawRing"
| is correct British pronunciation.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| Got a source for your "typical British pronunciation" of
| "pasta" being non-Italian? I read your comment as
| asserting that typical Brits pronounce it as "par-sta"
| with a non-rhotic 'r', but I don't think I've ever heard
| anyone except the Australian John Torode pronounce it
| that way.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I read your comment as asserting that typical Brits
| pronounce it as "par-sta" with a non-rhotic 'r'
|
| That is exactly the opposite of what TillE wrote. If that
| were how the British already pronounced the word, there
| would be no need to change the spelling.
|
| > Got a source for your "typical British pronunciation"
| of "pasta" being non-Italian?
|
| This is just infantile. You can verify the pronunciation
| yourself in any number of ways.
|
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pasta
| (UK pronunciation: /'paes.t@/)
|
| https://youglish.com/pronounce/pasta/english/uk , if you
| want audio samples.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pasta#Pronunciation (UK
| pronunciation: /'paest@/)
| biztos wrote:
| I have heard the people of Myanmar referred to as "Myanese"
| many times, in English, in Thailand. Enough that I might
| guess it'll establish itself, like Czech people being "from
| Czech" did in much of Europe (in English).
| kenneth wrote:
| Czech people are usually referred in English as being grim
| Czechia (if you don't wanna use the unwieldy Czech
| Republic)
| orlp wrote:
| Not sure why people didn't just agree on -i. Qatar -> Qatari,
| Zanzibar -> Zanzibari, to me Myanmar -> Myanmari makes
| perfect sense to me.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| The -i ending comes from Arabic which makes it seem a bit
| out of place in Myanmar (not to mention the obvious
| religious tension).
|
| -ese, -ian, -an and -n all come from Latin via routes of
| varying directness, which is why they feel somewhat
| "neutral" in English (e.g. Congolese and Japanese both seem
| cromulent and not intrinsically African or Asian).
| kenneth wrote:
| How did we arrive at Guamanian as the adjective for of
| Guam?
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Reminds me of Ivory Coast insisting that everyone call it Cote
| d'Ivoire, or even the "Republic of Cote d'Ivoire".
|
| Sure, fine, whatever. Everyone deserves to be called by their
| preferred name. I find it weird though, because every country
| has a respectful exonym, so a direct translation doesn't seem
| wrong, and mixing languages seems even weirder.
|
| I don't know why personal names don't typically get translated,
| but country names do, so this is not a hill worth dying on.
| It's just odd to me, especially since they are sticking with
| the colonial name instead of changing to some indigenous name.
| collegeburner wrote:
| me omw to go demand that people call us The United States of
| America in spanish instead of estados unidos
|
| like if people really gonna apply this standard they better
| do it consistently.
| kenneth wrote:
| You mean, in Espanol
| stingraycharles wrote:
| City names also get translated, but not regions / provinces.
| It's all so arbitrary, probably mostly for historical
| reasons.
|
| My own nationality (and perhaps yours, judging by your
| username?) comes to mind, Dutch, which doesn't even vaguely
| resemble the way we refer to ourselves ("Nederlands"), but is
| close to a very old naming of a region in our country
| ("Diets", ca. 1200 - 1550), how we call Germans ("Duits"),
| who call themselves different as well ("Deutsch"), where the
| word "German" probably stems from Germanic, which refers to a
| historical group of people in Central and Scandinavian
| Europe, comparable to "Latin".
| poizan42 wrote:
| Just fyi., Dutch, Deutsch, Diets etc. are derived from
| Proto-Germanic *thiudiskaz ("of the people, popular")[1]
|
| [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deutsch
| Maxmo74 wrote:
| Well.. Tuscany, Apulia, Lombardy, Sicily, Sardinia,
| Piedmont. Where did you find that regions don't get
| translated?
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Mmm I had some French regions in mind, which typically
| don't get translated in my own language at all (eg Cote
| d'Azure), but I just realized we do translate Pyrenees to
| "Pyreneeen" and there are probably many other examples as
| well.
|
| We also translate Paris to Parijs, and Lille has an
| official translation to Rijsel but nobody uses that.
|
| Sheesh if this were a codebase it would raise some
| serious questions about variable naming standards.
| Maxmo74 wrote:
| Costa azzurra in Italian, apparently.
|
| Pretty sure we had several posts on HM related to the
| weirdness of translations for names.
|
| But there are cities like Denver. Luckier than others, in
| that respect ;)
| stingraycharles wrote:
| And Amsterdam, but TIL Rome is called Roma in Italian. :)
| bombcar wrote:
| Personal names will sometimes be translated - depending on
| when the person moved or decided to present as.
|
| I know of Indian colleagues who go by an English-sounding
| name that is at least somewhat close to their actual name.
| Others have anglicized a spelling that is phonetically close.
|
| The main difference is that you can ask them what they prefer
| as they're right there.
|
| It's harder to ask an entire country.
| kenneth wrote:
| My middle name is Olivier, by in English for a while I just
| translated it to Oliver.
| roxymusic1973 wrote:
| > Personal names will sometimes be translated - depending
| on when the person moved or decided to present as.
|
| E.g.
| https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_II_del_Reino_Unido
| koala_man wrote:
| Or Cristoforo Colombo, aka Christopher Columbus
| int_19h wrote:
| Historically it's more common than not. E.g. most names
| of European monarchs are translated.
| havkom wrote:
| concinds wrote:
| Trolls are the only people saying this. Part of the motivation
| for the name change was to avoid being named the same as the
| bird. https://greekreporter.com/2022/06/07/petition-change-
| name-tu...
| Fred27 wrote:
| Let's rename the bird too and then see what happens.
| adrian_b wrote:
| But the turkey bird was named after the country Turkey,
| because the British wrongly believed that these birds are
| imported from Turkey.
|
| Similarly inappropriate names are used in French and in
| Portuguese, based on wrong beliefs about the origin of the
| turkey birds (from India or from Peru).
|
| While in French the relationship between "dinde" and "d'Inde"
| is less obvious, Peru might object on the same grounds as
| Turkey to the turkey being called "peru" in Portuguese.
|
| I believe that is always better to use the native names of
| countries, places, people and so on, but unfortunately, it is
| not realistic to expect that most native English speakers
| will ever be able to pronounce most foreign names in a way
| resembling their original pronunciation.
|
| Even for the countries whose names happen to be written in
| the same way in English as in their own language, the English
| speakers pronounce them very differently, mainly because they
| are habituated to correspondences between vowel letters and
| vowel sounds that are unlike those used in any other
| language.
| someotherperson wrote:
| Fun fact: the word for orange (the fruit) in Arabic and
| Turkish is named after Portugal the country :)
| adrian_b wrote:
| That is also true at least for Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek
| and Romanian, and possibly also for other languages of
| countries that had been dominated by the Turkish Empire.
| burtuqal wrote:
| Double fun fact, it's the other way around :)
| Koffiepoeder wrote:
| About a week ago the UN approved the decision to change the
| country's name from Turkey to Turkiye. ISO now follows suit and
| updated the short and full name of the country.
| emptyfile wrote:
| When your annual inflation is 75% (in reality more like 150%),
| start inventing nonsense to distract the population.
| deadmanku wrote:
| nobody cares about english name of country.
| Hamuko wrote:
| And even less people care about the ISO English name of a
| country.
| henearkr wrote:
| waqf wrote:
| Next up: Guinea. And the Kiwis.
| dmurray wrote:
| And the Canaries.
| gumby wrote:
| By the way the Kiwis tried to brand the Chinese gooseberry
| the "kiwi" so people would think of NZ produce, but made two
| fatal errors: 1 - they forgot to trademark it and 2 - they
| forgot that people outside AUS and NZ don't think of New
| Zealand at all.
| rswail wrote:
| You mean Aotearoa?
| gumby wrote:
| I suspect even (or especially?) most Aussies don't know
| that name.
| henearkr wrote:
| Yep. And the best is: in Turkish language a turkey is called
| "hindi" (meaning India).
|
| And both of those words for the bird, turkey or hindi, come
| from the fact that in medieval times people where mixing up
| India, Middle-East, and America together, and thought of it
| as just "India".
|
| So the bird was named after the country.
|
| Thus, Frankurt should rename itself too, right? I mean, it's
| the same as a sausage, what a shame booo.
| prmoustache wrote:
| In portuguese the word for the bird is peru, probably for
| similar reason.
| lstodd wrote:
| don't forget hamburgers
| laumars wrote:
| There are several sausages that share the prefix
| "Frankfurters" such as Frankfurter Wurstchen (which is the
| hotdog style sausage that Americans have shortened to just
| "Frankfurter"). In fact it's not just sausages that have
| that name, there's also a cake called "Frankfurter Kranz".
|
| And why do all these dishes have that name? Because they
| are specialities believed to have originated from Frankfurt
| am Main. In other words, they got their name from the city.
|
| This is pretty common to. In the U.K. we have Cornish
| Pasty, Yorkshire Pudding, English Breakfast, Scottish
| Breakfast. There's Eccles Cake, welsh Cake, Bath buns,
| Chelsea Buns and Bakewell Tarts. You can get Irish Coffee
| and Irish Stew.
|
| Americans have no shortage of the same too. Like
| Mississippi Mud Pie.
| [deleted]
| youamericanloo wrote:
| now Turkish people have personality. congratulation, I am
| impressed Turkiye. Find me handsome, kisses, mughhht!
| Accacin wrote:
| So, for any Turks out there. How do I pronouce 'Turkiye'?
| quasarj wrote:
| Well, English lacks U, and I, so in reality it will be Turkiye,
| which is will be said something like "turk-eye-eeee". You're
| welcome.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Well if y'all are gonna be like that I'm just going to call
| you guys Anatolia. I'm bringing it back, baby! /s
| rob_c wrote:
| given nobody can even agree and decide between GB and UK I'll
| just skip this and get back to work...
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Why not Turkland?
| auganov wrote:
| Terrible branding. Going from a high-recognition, easy to
| pronounce and spell name to this. It's pretty well-established
| simple names always perform better. If the Turkish government was
| very liberal perhaps it would earn them some goodwill among the
| literati, but they tend to hate Erdogan.
| 4lb0 wrote:
| > Easy to pronounce
|
| That's very anglocentric
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Strange... No "keyboard wars" on the comments yet. That's
| something different compared to other forums where Greeks and
| Turks start fighting and swearing at each other about names,
| history, borders and so on.
|
| Interesting to note that this name change has to do with the "big
| vision" the current Turkish government has about the country,
| although I've read that this change is because they didn't like
| to be associated with the bird/animal Turkey :-)
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Poland ended communism with numerous streets dedicated to Lenin,
| Stalin, Dzierzynski et al. These went like overnight.
|
| But maybe grayscale patrons remained and lingered. If someone was
| "just" a prime minister, not particularly zealous, but still in
| the Soviet service, are they ok or not? There are different waves
| of "decommunisation" going throughout time.
|
| Thing is, each time renaming a street is a lot of havoc. Official
| records, business registration addresses, business cards, logos,
| subscriptions, everything needs to change.
|
| For this reason such changes end up stuck in limbo and are often
| eventually abandoned or undone.
|
| I wonder if Turkiye will encounter similar issues.
| captainmuon wrote:
| I just learned that Greece is called Yunanistan in Turkey.
|
| And as long as the English speaking world still butchers German
| town names (Hanover, Hamelin, Nuremberg instead of Hannover,
| Hameln, Nurnberg) I think it is legit to call the country Turkey.
| kzrdude wrote:
| It's a curious tug of war. Of course every language is allowed
| to have its own words. Global use of English puts a special
| pressure on English.
| timeon wrote:
| > English speaking world still butchers German town names
|
| Try Czech: Cachy, Trevir, Rezno vs Aachen, Trier, Regensburg.
| febeling wrote:
| I also find it odd to think differing names of places in a
| foreign language as butchering. I like how Munchen (Munich) is
| called Monaco in Italian.
|
| But if we do think it's butchering, why don't we refer to
| Germans as Deutsche in English, call the country Deutschland
| instead of Germany?
| jcranmer wrote:
| Some other fun country butcherings: Magyarorszag, Hrvatska,
| Suomi, Ellada. For which the English names are the oh-so-
| obvious Hungary, Croatia, Finland, and Greece. I haven't even
| left Europe yet!
| korlja wrote:
| Forget towns. Talk about the fucking name of the country.
|
| Actually, the name is "Deutschland" (if you leave out the
| political decorations declaring it a federal republic).
|
| One should think, knowing where the word comes from, that the
| english name would be "Dutchland". But it isn't, instead they
| call someone else "Dutch". Admittedly a neighbouring country
| with some shared history and origins waaay back then, but
| still. Tyskland is great, thanks to everyone using a
| variation of that.
|
| Then there is "Germany". Way back then, when the romans tried
| and failed to establish a longterm presence on the other side
| of the rivers rhine and danube that might have been ok, but
| that was 2000 years ago. For at least the last 500 years,
| "deutsch" or some variation thereof was official. Germans are
| also only part of the historic inhabitants of what forms
| modern-day Germany, there are also a few Slavic tribes in
| there. Also, there are many German tribes that didn't settle
| in what is modern-day Germany, instead they now form the
| nordic states, the Netherlands, parts of Switzerland and
| Austria. So mostly wrong, no fish.
|
| Alemania is even more wrong, because that actually only talks
| about the southwestern german tribes, in current southwest
| Germany and northeastern Switzerland. "Alemannisch" strictly
| only describes the traditions of that region in german.
| Nothing else.
|
| Then there is Niemcy and stuff. I've been told it means
| something like "mutes" or "the ones you cannot comprehend".
| I'm not sure if that is supposed to be an insult or a
| compliment, but really, after you started talking to us you
| couldn't be arsed to ask what we call ourselves?
|
| Talking about insults: Saksa might be considered a compliment
| or an insult in Germany, depending on where you are.
| Historically, saxon tribes settled in the northwest (later
| England, but that is not relevant here). This corresponds to
| a part of what currently is the German land Niedersachsen.
| There are two Lander that are called something with
| "sachsen", but they are faking it to get a grab at the former
| glory. Talking about "glory", it is quite the opposite in
| southern Germany, there nobody likes "Sachsen" and considers
| them the worst kind of "Preussen". Which are all considered
| insults there.
|
| There are a few others, getting more and more weird until:
| Navajo: Beesh Bich'ahii Bikeyah ("Metal Cap-wearer Land"), in
| reference to Stahlhelm-wearing German soldiers.[1] I can get
| behind that. But the rest, please stop it, it is
| "Deutschland". Or I might have to wear my metal cap again ;)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany
| orbital-decay wrote:
| _> Then there is Niemcy and stuff. I've been told it means
| something like "mutes" or "the ones you cannot comprehend".
| I'm not sure if that is supposed to be an insult or a
| compliment, but really, after you started talking to us you
| couldn't be arsed to ask what we call ourselves?_
|
| It was a common name for all foreigners, not just Germans.
| During a certain era, German traders were the most common
| foreigners in Slavic lands, so the name stuck with Germans.
| NeoTar wrote:
| I love how it's a similar origin story to the word
| 'Barbarian' - deriving from anyone who wasn't Greek, and
| so whose language sounded like "baa-baa baa-baa"
| usrusr wrote:
| > There are two Lander that are called something with
| "sachsen", but they are faking it to get a grab at the
| former glory.
|
| Let me guess: the one of the three Lander that are called
| something with "sachsen" that you forget is Niedersachsen,
| even despite spelling it out literally one word before that
| sentence! Being born in the only saxon capital of the of
| the country I was born in I've made a habit out of
| confusing saxons from the east by claiming that I'm one of
| them, never gets old.
|
| (yeah, and I was close to posting that wiki link myself, so
| happy that nobody has started referring to the country by
| what it's most famous for)
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Yes, and Finns don't call their country "Finland" --
| Finnish language, after all, doesn't uses "f" natively --
| they call it "Suomi" and they call Russia "Venaja" (even
| though Wends really don't have much to do with it). So
| what? Names are arbitrary, especially names in different
| languages, that's just how they are.
|
| As the Russian proverb says, "you can call me even
| 'kettle', just don't put me on the stove".
| usr1106 wrote:
| The first prize goes to the French, though.
|
| They call their country France, named after the
| _Germanic_ tribe of the Franks. Only in Asterix they
| remember that their country should be called Gaul.
| int_19h wrote:
| Eh. The name "Bulgaria" derives from Bulgars, who were a
| nomadic Turkic tribe from areas around the Caspian Sea
| that came to conquer the country.
|
| For another example, the name "Russia" is derived from
| "Rus", which itself appears to be a derivative of the
| Norse "Ruslaw" - again, because it was the Norse who
| came, conquered, and became the ruling elite.
|
| Basically, it happened all the time.
| NeoTar wrote:
| The Germanic tribe who invaded and conquered the lands
| currently known as France, forming (at least) the
| aristocracy and then naming it after themselves? Isn't
| that a reasonable name for the country? I mean, it also
| happened in England (i.e. land of the Angles) - which
| historically would have been Britannia when France was
| Gaul.
| kergonath wrote:
| > They call their country France, named after the
| Germanic tribe of the Franks.
|
| You mean, the Germans who call it "Frankreich"?
|
| There were several Frankish tribes, who occupied over the
| years regions from Thuringia all the way to Gascony. You
| might have heard of Clovis, king of the Franks, baptised
| at Reims and who made Paris the capital of his kingdom,
| and founded the Frankish Merovingian dynasty that ruled
| almost all of what is France now for 2 centuries. Gauls
| had been heavily romanised well before that point anyway.
|
| You should probably read a bit in a subject before trying
| to be clever.
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| > why don't we refer to Germans as Deutsche in English, call
| the country Deutschland instead of Germany?
|
| Because the Germans aren't throwing a fit about how other
| countries are addressing them in their languages, while the
| Turks currently are.
|
| Given how Turkey currently has insane inflation and internal
| political turmoil with Erdogan's opposition rising, there's a
| line of thought that has war as the only way to maintain
| power for Erdogan, much like how a coup solidified his power
| in 2016.
|
| Turkey's neighbors probably should start feeling like Ukraine
| before February, or like Poland before September 1939.
| amilios wrote:
| Interesting! In Greek Munich is also Monakho
| (Monacho/Monaco).
| gkanai wrote:
| Same thing with Japan. Japanese call the country Nippon.
| frivoal wrote:
| Or, more commonly, Nihon. Nippon is more emphatic, which is
| occasionally taken to make it sound more nationalistic.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I'd strongly prefer is this 'butchering' would be happening
| only in cases the original name is literally un-pronounciable
| in given language.
|
| But no, everybody must be pissing on their little sandbox -
| Neuchatel _has_ to be Neuburg, although both are perfectly
| pronounciable in both languages. US has to be Etats-Unis.
| Practically every effin ' language has this.
|
| I'd say using original names and how they sound shows some
| proper respect towards given place, country, people, culture
| and its history. Shows you actually make some effort, and
| also shows having some class. But I can only wish this was a
| widespread opinion.
| andybak wrote:
| For the record, I'm fairly sure how to pronounce Neuburg
| but much less confident I'd get Neuchatel correct.
| gumby wrote:
| Especially when the circumflex has been left out so you
| have no reminder of how used to be written and
| pronounced.
|
| Etats-Unis is quite respectful as it literally describes
| how the country wants to be considered: United States. It
| is only if you don't find the term meaningful that way
| you would want someone to uncomprehendingly parrot the
| sounds.
| ars wrote:
| In Hebrew, India is called Hodu, which seems to be a name
| unique to Hebrew (although with quite ancient origins).
| brosinante wrote:
| And the actual name for Greece is Hellas.
| kgeist wrote:
| They didn't always call themselves Hellenes, at one point the
| more common names were Achaeans (hence Egyptian "Ekwesh"),
| Danaans and Argives. The word "Hellenes" is only found once
| in Homer. Or often people called them by their specific
| tribe, such as Ionians or Dorians. Some languages use older
| names because that's what they are used to. It seems that
| country borders, politics, self-identity etc. change faster
| than language.
| amilios wrote:
| You're right in that the term Hellenes appears later,
| however it is worth noting that there was still some sense
| of collective identity, even that far back, as evidenced by
| the tribes coming together when facing external threats
| (e.g. the Persians, or even against Troy in the Iliad),
| common language, culture, competitions that everyone
| participated in, etc. etc.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > And the actual name for Greece is Hellas.
|
| That's many centuries out of date. You want Ellas. The
| aspiration was lost long ago.
|
| (We might also note that the Greek wikipedia page is titled
| Ellada, but the first thing it does is list Ellas as an
| alternate name.)
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| MrDresden wrote:
| And they all come from Ummerica
| [deleted]
| eCa wrote:
| A favourite of mine is Nueva York.
| kergonath wrote:
| You should see how the English call la Nouvelle Orleans...
| pezezin wrote:
| Or the state of Nuevo Mexico...
| usrusr wrote:
| That's not butchering, it means that the places you list have
| been sufficiently relevant to speakers of the language in
| question at the time spelling stabilized to have their own
| name. The phrase "Mailand oder Madrid" isn't famous for it not
| being "Milano oder Madrid".
| egeozcan wrote:
| Also Hindistan (Land of the Hindi) means India, and "hindi"
| means turkey, in Turkish. Misir also means corn and also Egypt
| in the same language.
| dizhn wrote:
| Yup. It's pretty ignorant to call India the land of
| turkeys,while throwing a fit when other countries call yours
| Turkey.
| cetinkaya wrote:
| timeon wrote:
| Maybe the bird will be also called turkiye now.
| walrus01 wrote:
| And the actual bird, in Iranian Farsi, is a "booghoolamoo",
| which is roughly the same idea as the gobbling noise a turkey
| makes.
|
| In Afghan Farsi (Dari) the bird is a "feel murgh" which
| translates as Elephant Chicken.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Greece is also Yunan in Farsi , this is a _very_ old word in
| the Persian language.
| someotherperson wrote:
| The whole Middle East has called it some variation of Yunan
| (Yunanistan specifically meaning "Land of the Yunan") for about
| 3000 years. It derives from Ionian[0] and roughly specified the
| land Ionia[1] region and the name is baked into everything
| (modern and historical) from Hebrew to Persian to Arabic to
| Assyrian.
|
| On the back of this, though, in many countries in the Middle
| East the Latin names are used for most countries in Europe,
| including Germany, which is referred to as _Alemaan_ (from
| proto-Germanic Alemanniz[2]).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionians
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionia
|
| [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Alemanni
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The whole Middle East has called it some variation of Yunan
| (Yunanistan specifically meaning "Land of the Yunan") for
| about 3000 years. It derives from Ionian
|
| > the name is baked into everything (modern and historical)
| from Hebrew to Persian to Arabic to Assyrian.
|
| The term is also used in Han China for the Greek kingdom that
| came to exist near them. There would have been no real
| awareness of the original region of Ionia, though there was
| rudimentary awareness of the Roman Empire a bit later.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayuan
| behnamoh wrote:
| The region that's now called "Iran" was called Persia by the
| West for at least 2000 years, until the Shah of Iran
| requested the world to refer to the country as "Iran", which
| is the term used by the Iranians.
|
| Fun fact: "Iran" means "the land of the Aryans".
| hnbad wrote:
| As a German I'm fine with _Alemaan_ (note that the German
| name for Germany is nothing like _Germany_ either).
|
| But it's worth noting that in German "Alman" has become the
| equivalent of "gammon" in the UK, especially among immigrants
| and in youth culture. I.e. a derogatory slur for a specific
| type of native-born person (usually men) holding naively
| reactionary views. Not necessarily intentionally racist but
| always ignorant.
| ascorbic wrote:
| Vereinigtes Konigreich checking in
| korlja wrote:
| Vereinigtes Konigreich von Grossbritannien und Nordirland
| bitte.
|
| Also, even more weirdness about the channel islands and the
| "British" overseas territories (which are isles, but not
| British isles...).
| smt88 wrote:
| Hanover instead of Hannover is "butchering" to you?
| haasted wrote:
| An absolute carnage!!
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Yes, username smmt8, it is.
| jalk wrote:
| Would you campaign for it to be written as Hannofer in
| English so that non-German speakers will not butcher the
| current pronunciation. Obviously there are long historical
| reasons for language diffs of city names and I imagine many
| predates the nation states who now house those cities.
| Changes in local pronunciation is also a thing, and those
| changes are of course not always propagated to other
| languages
| magicalhippo wrote:
| We make a product which sends data to some gov't system. If a
| user needs to send a correction, it should be done using the
| rules that were in place when the initial version was sent.
|
| So all code lists, including country codes or EU membership,
| needs to have a validity date range per entry. Fun!
| usrusr wrote:
| In a way it's understandable that people like seeing their
| country called in their own language. But isn't that actually
| more a sign of irrelevance than a sign of status? A village does
| not have a toponym in any other language, but famous cities tend
| to have, and those who don't might be a bit short on history.
|
| How about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany ? (yes,
| we consider ourselves lucky that noone calls the country by what
| it's most famous for)
| darkhorn wrote:
| It is a sign of dictatorship. Just like in the video The
| Dictator.
| kgeist wrote:
| It's true that the older and more famous a placename, the more
| likely it is to have different forms in neighboring languages.
| All languages evolve phonetically, and during the course of
| this evolution, the pronunciation of all words changes
| (independently in every language), including (especially)
| toponyms which were borrowed 500-1000 years ago. It's a sad
| misconception that if a toponym is pronounced differently, then
| it means it's "butchered". I think it's part of our common
| history and it should be embraced, not erased.
| usrusr wrote:
| Yeah, the truly interesting part is where you make the cutoff
| in regions where borders shifted. Strassburg instead of
| Strasbourg hopefully doesn't get perceived as a claim to the
| place and neither should Danzig, but I'd rather write
| Kaliningrad because those people are so damn thin-skinned,
| bordering on paranoia (they might even feel threatened by the
| letters Sank Petersburg, even if that can't possibly mean
| anything other than respect). But random villages that used
| to have a name in a language that isn't spoken there anymore?
| Hands off, unless you desperately want to sound "that way"
| (you shouldn't!). In an explicitly historical context, you
| should at least acknowledge the current name.
| kgeist wrote:
| >but I'd rather write Kaliningrad because those people are
| so damn thin-skinned, bordering on paranoia
|
| In Kaliningrad, the locals colloquially call their city
| Koenig (short for Koenigsberg), they're totally fine with
| it. Although, the context matters, of course.
| usrusr wrote:
| Nice to hear that, I guess it shouldn't be surprising
| that people who actually live there might be less
| concerned about a hypothetical reclaim than people
| hundreds of kilometers away. If you only know it from the
| map (well, that's also me) that's a what-if not rooted in
| reality one way or the other at all.
| kenneth wrote:
| I imagine most people in Konigsburg would much rather be
| part of Deutschland than Rossiia though.
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