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 Türkiye. 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.
>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.
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..
For a similar issue in Japan check the order of Name and Surname, or Surname and Name in English and Japanese, as it has been officially been swapping a few times.
> 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.
What's a "country"? You are talking about "sovereign state"–whether or not Taiwan counts as one, or could, depends on which theory of statehood one supports (constitutive or declarative)–but something can be a "country" without being a sovereign state. The ISO 3166-1 list is officially of countries and "dependent territories", but many people talk of those "dependent territories" (especially the more major ones) as "countries". And then people commonly speak of the constituent countries of the UK (England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales) as "countries" – seems particularly common in British English (and more British-influenced English varieties), but one even hears Americans speak of them in that way at times. Fewer people know this, but the Kingdom of the Netherlands is divided into four constituent countries as well (the Netherlands proper – which includes both the European part and the Caribbean islands of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, Saba; Aruba; Curaçao; and Sint Maarten). Similarly, the Kingdom of Denmark is also divided into three countries – Denmark proper, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. And one of France's overseas territories, French Polynesia, is officially classified under French law as an "overseas country" of France. Canada officially recognises Quebec, not as a "country", but as a "nation" (a term which is often used interchangeably with "country").
> Contrast this with Kosovo who claim to be an independent country and are somewhat recognised.
Kosovo is recognised by about 50% of the world's states, including all of the G7 states. They've also been accepted as members of several intergovernmental organisations, including the World Bank and IMF. And yet, unlike Taiwan, ISO still won't give them an official country code - ISO gives the reason that they won't give them a code until the UN Statistical Division gives them a code, and I guess the UN Statistical Division sees it as a political hot potato they don't want to touch.
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.
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.
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 中国 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 "Türkiye" indefinitely, except in cases where ISO/UN standard are really required.
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).
Türkiye was, and I presume still in, Turquie in French. So made in Türkiye is Fabriqie en Turquie.
Uh? No, I think the point is that labels "Made in Turkey" ran the risk of being lazily translated to "Fabriqué 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".
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.
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..
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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 Città 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].
Wait, I thought Türkiye 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?
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.
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.
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 Académie Française. They would die laughing.
I wonder if Georgia should ask to be called Sakartvelo (which is how it's called in Georgian language), just to stop those "the country, not the state" clarifications when talking to US people.
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. coördinate.
For non-French diacritics, it is on a case-by-case basis. Most English speakers would accept ñ and even write it e.g "El Niño event". Nordic ø is questionable but would be accepted in place names. Phở is right out.
You will definitely see jalapeños and such on UK food packaging. I just searched the bbc website for "jalapeño" and found this page [0] which uses both spellings (!). It also links to a page on "habañero" (sic) so yeah you can say that British familiarity with Ñ is somewhat of a mixed bag.
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.
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?
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 Ü, let alone İ. In addition, English speakers don't have [y], [c], or word-final [e] in their phoneme inventory.
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.
