Catching Australia vs. Türkiye because that’s happening in Vancouver at BC Place Stadium, the first #WorldCup match ever there.

Hmmm… I just noticed that Apple autocorrects Türkiye so that the umlaut is added and I don’t like that. I think all special characters in English should be voluntary.

@atomicpoet if you had diacritics in the spelling of your name that changes the pronunciation and meaning of it, you'd probably appreciate it if autocorrect picked the representation that was actually, you know, correct?

@smn That argument only works if you believe endonyms are always correct. Which they’re not.

“Italia” isn’t necessarily the right way to refer to Italy, “Suomi” is not necessarily the right way to refer to Finland, and “日本” isn’t necessarily the right way to refer to Japan.

Exonyms are perfectly fine. Turks use them too.

The problem with pushing English speakers to use special characters to reflect accuracy of endonyms is that it’s actually quite Eurocentric and gets absurd real quick.

China mandated a change from “Peking” to “Beijing”, but what they didn’t push for was to reflect the complete Mandarin endonym of the city.

Because if they did, we’d be referring to Beijing as “Běijīng”.

That doesn’t even do the endonym justice because the “B” and “J” in Mandarin for “Beijing” is different from how English speakers pronounce it. In Pinyin, the “b” is voiceless and unaspirated. And the actual “j” is much closer to the hard, sharp English “j” in jeep or jingle.

But when you realize that Mandarin is a tonal language, and it takes some time for an English speaker to differentiate between them—“Běijīng” doesn’t even do the endonym justice if you’re unaware that the characters indicate tones.

And why the hell are we using Roman characters anyway? Even Pinyin isn’t an accurate representation. Of course, actual Chinese people refer to Beijing as “北京”. And the literal meaning is:

• 北 (Běi): North / Northern
• 京 (Jīng): Capital

Which is way more accurate than “Beijing”.

Nevertheless, asking English speakers to perfectly preserve an endonym in every case is a tall ask. The People’s Republic of China realized this. They don’t demand that we all start using simplified Chinese characters when referring to Chinese place names.

Which is why they’re perfectly find with “Beijing”.

@atomicpoet @smn endonyms/exonyms isn’t about preserving exact spelling or morphology of place names. this often wouldn’t even be possible because many languages have stricter rules about how words are formed than english. most of the “exonyms” you mentioned (italy, turkey, peking, beijing) are actually endonyms. and yeah endonyms aren’t necessarily always appropriate because they may be virtually unknown locally too (egypt is an exonym, and so is al-mīsr used in egyptian arabic. the egyptian language survives only as a liturgical language for coptic varieties of christianity, in which egypt is referred to by the endonym “keme” or “kemi”)

@atomicpoet if you want to use an exonym for türkiye there's always "turkey"

@crmsnbleyd Yeah, but the reason it’s Turkiye now is specifically because the government hates the association with the bird. And also, that “turkey” has become a slang word for “loser. As in, “His latest tech startup was a total turkey and folded within six months.”

So I get why they’re doing the rebrand. I just think that pushing for the umlaut is a step too far.

@atomicpoet idk if they're pushing it, like to them it's probably just part of the Latin script. Like for example Curaçao, they just spell it like that.

@atomicpoet @smn Deutsche have no problem referring to themselves as Germans. The only problem I encounter in this context is if an app uses the endonym for sorting, but displays the exonym, or vice versa.

@atomicpoet @crmsnbleyd I find this quite funny because the bird is called Turkey because it was Turkish merchants who first brought it over the Atlantic to Europe. Or rather it was called "Turkey Cock" which later got shortened to "Turkey".

Similarly for corn, which was called "türkisch Korn" or "Türken" in parts of Switzerland and Austria.

Many of the new world animals and crops were introduced to Europe by Turkish merchants, but most like to ignore this part of history.

@atomicpoet china has northern capital (北京) and Japan has eastern capital (東京) …very creative guys

@chjara @atomicpoet I hope I can still claim 西京(derogatory)

@charlotte @atomicpoet @smn It’s the hallmark of an important place or nation that it has names in other languages. Rome has names in most human languages by now, I bet, and nobody in Roma has tried to force a change. It’s one thing to want to get rid of a colonial name (Rhodesia to Zimbabwe), quite another to force everyone to use only one specific name, especially if it comes with non-ASCII characters.