Red Square wrote: ↑3/19/2025, 8:32 pm
There seems to be a trend of renaming Turkey to Türkiye in English. Really? Then let’s be consistent, comrades - let's also rename Hungary into Magyarország, Ireland into Éireann, Germany into Deutschland, Spain into España, Russia into Rosseeya, Ukraine into Ookrayeena, Finland into Suomi, and so on.
Wouldn't it be fun to confuse native English speakers even further by making English sound like Google Translate with an identity crisis? Then we can take them with bare hands.
Of course, Trump can always retaliate and demand that the people of Türkiye pronounce the USA as "United States of ‘Murica."
And, in the spirit of linguistic justice, let’s insist that everyone in the world pronounce ‘Worcestershire’ correctly on the first try.
This has bothered me for decades, or at least since the pearl-clutching cultural-respect knee-benders changed Peking to Beijing, Ivory Coast to Cǒte d'Ivoire and Bombay to Mumbai. And for what? To be more accurate? To be less Euro-Centric? Or to show humility by prostrating ourselves before the non-English speaking world by changing our English-language maps?
It goes further. How many ways are there now to spell Moammar Khaddafi's name? AP changed it at least three times as more and still more new transliterations emerged. What's next? Will we have to learn to pronounce Namibian place names in the Kung-San click language to read a map?
And who's there to enforce these changes? Nobody. Every time I hear of a new change I can only think we're being jerked around by anti-colonialists who want to see how far they can go at making us suckers.
Just as King Arthur reacted when
The Knights Who Say Ni told him to cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with a herring, we should stop playing along and walk away.
This is why I don't spell "Zelensky" with two Ys: it may be a more precise transliteration but, like all of the above, the arcane nit-picking of linguists is of no consequence to the American general public who want to read an English-language map without having to get a graduate degree in foreign language phonology.
P.S.
And don't get me started on Welsh place names: they should all be chopped off after six letters or be reduced to acronyms or numbers.
P.P.S.
We should all take a lesson from the WWI British soldiers who published
The Wipers Times. They started their satirical "newspaper" while in Ypres, Belgium and couldn't be bothered with a practically unpronounceable
"The Ypres Times," so they changed
Ypres to
Wipers.
