Catholic Info
Traditional Catholic Faith => Politics and World Leaders => Topic started by: Matthew on May 18, 2025, 10:39:58 AM
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What's up with the recent tendency to "retcon" or retroactively change the name of various countries and places?
Two recent examples:
Why Turkey is now 'Türkiye', and why that matters
Türkiye's authorities have decided to rebrand their country's international image, here is why.
And of course:
Kiev --> kyiv ("keev")
So Turkey got sick of all the poultry jokes and references? Give me a break. And no, I'm not going to write UMLAUTS (the two dots over a letter) in my daily life as an English speaking American. When I set up a PC, I select "English/US" for my keyboard layout, and all my keyboards are printed for English. I'm not set up to crank out umlauts in my typing, posts, etc. and I'm 100% OK with that. My language doesn't use them.
So you have to romanize or Americanize it somewhat, sorry. We English speakers have the dominant language, the lingua franca of the world, we get that privilege. You can call your country whatever you want (the Germans call their country "Deutchland"), but I'm going to stick with the ENGLISH translation of your country's name. I won't be clicking, humming, whistling, or using any phonetic sounds that don't exist in an English speaker's mouth in my daily speech.
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I really hate it. The Turkish Government have no right to decide what English-speakers refer to their country as in our own language. Turkey is not an offensive term, and that should be the only reason a country should ever be allowed to protest about its name in another language.
It's shameful that so many newspapers and websites are kow-towing to this nonsense.
It's also hypocritical - the Turks call the US "Amerika Birleşik Devletleri" and England "İngiltere", so they have no issue with ignoring the local names of other countries, yet they demand we use a name which is both impossible to pronounce and impossible to type in English.
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Kiev to Kyiv is part of the attempt to Ukrainianize the country after the fall of the Soviet Union. So dumping the Russian names like Lvov, Nikolaev, Odessa, Uzhgorod in favor of their Ukrainian-language counterparts.
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Kiev to Kyiv is part of the attempt to Ukrainianize the country after the fall of the Soviet Union. So dumping the Russian names like Lvov, Nikolaev, Odessa, Uzhgorod in favor of their Ukrainian-language counterparts.
Well, besides the fact that it's been called Kiev in English for a thousand years, news broadcasters don't even attempt to pronounce Kyiv correctly and just say "Keev" which sounds awful and ironically more like the Russian pronunciation than the Ukrainian one.
When it really got ridiculous was when I saw "Chicken Kyiv" at the supermarket.