Both this article and its source are misrepresenting the actual quote. Its seems to be about rumors that rare earth minerals are being sold now.
>Responding to the allegations that 'rare earth elements are sold to the USA', Bayraktar said that there is absolutely no such thing. Bayraktar said, "The agreement we made and signed in America was also a nuclear-related agreement. If we had done it about rare earth elements, be sure, they would have declared it too, we would have declared it," he said.
Yep, this is about local politics. It is customary in Turkish politics to discover vast natural resources from time to time and promise that good times are ahead if you vote for Erdogan one more time(this field was discovered months before the 2023 elections).
They are often exaggerated, although resources exist. There's a meme from the previous election cycle about a pro-Erdogan TV personality celebrating the natural gas reserves discovered before elections instructing citizens to open the windows and run the boilers even if its a hot day because Turkey is now a natural gas boss.
The Turkish state isn't shy from selling access to these resources to foreign companies but this often leads to scandals and environmental disasters. Last year SSR mining, a Canadian company, had a huge mine collapse. Also, there are issues about cutting down forests to access mines that creates a lot of trouble for the government as it leads to widespread protests.
So what's the minister is actually saying is that Don't worry we are not going to sell it to foreign companies that will ruin the environment this time in response to rumours that they are going to sell it. But in Turkey, nobody remembers anything so anything can happen.
Off-Topic: Why Türkiye? Why not keep using Turkey in English?
I know they changed their name to Türkiye, but why would we change it in our languages? We still use Germany instead of Deutschland, India instead of Bharat, and Italy instead of Italia.
Yeah, I'm from Turkey and it's really annoying for me to use a keyboard shortcuts to select "Türkiye" from dropdowns using year old "T", "U", "R" keys. Now in some websites it's "Turkey" and in some websites it's "Türkiye" I need to switch keyboard layouts just to select my country name.
Even though, website doesn't let me use my actual name since my name has non ascii characters so I need to try many times.
This reminds me of my own struggles in locating my country in various dropdowns. Sometimes it‘s the trivial to find Austria, but sometimes Österreich under O and other times Österreich under Ö (sorted to the very bottom). Collation is fun!
"Following an official letter submitted to the United Nations by the Republic of Türkiye, the country's name has been officially changed to Türkiye at the UN.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said that a letter had been received on June 1 from the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Cavuşoğlu addressed to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, requesting the use of “Türkiye” instead of “Turkey” for all affairs." [1]
"Foreign Minister Cavuşoğlu said in a tweet that the move would "increase our country's brand value".
The country’s English language public broadcaster TRT World said, the move would help to disassociate the country’s image from the large bird of the same name."[2]
So what? The UN does not have the power to redefine what words mean in the English language, and neither does the Republic of Turkey. If Germany submitted an official letter somewhere purporting to change its English name to Deutschland, you should also not listen to them.
Why the hostility? It's not like they changed the name of the Black Sea to the Sea of Turkey. It's not a "fuck you" move. Just keep spelling it the old way if you care for some reason.
Because the attempted name change is being done purely to stroke the ego of a right-wing authoritarian nationalist strongman. Attempts by such people to remake language according to their whims should be resisted whenever possible.
> It's not like they changed the name of the Black Sea to the Sea of Turkey.
I'm sure Erdogan would do just that if there were any realistic possibility that anybody would actually follow it. The "Türkiye" name change is as much as he thinks he can get away with.
Exactly my point. And it doesn't apply only to English. There are 200+ languages and 8+ billion people in the world, and none of them is obliged to change the way they talk because someone doesn't like what a specific word means in one of those languages.
As a Turkish person I used to agree with you. Not anymore. My people don't want to be associated with an ugly bird and I respect that. Also we don't want an exception. We're ready to use Bharat, Deutschland or any other name in our language if those nations want that. Same for the city names. It's about respecting those countries and their people.
Fun fact: India is Hindistan in Turkish which literally means Land of Turkeys. Maybe we should really change. Bharat means spice which is a better name.
India's main official name is India. Bharat (from Sanskrit) is coequal according to the constitution, and Hindustan (from Persian) is also sometimes used.
That's mostly because English is one of the two official languages of India, and even the local native languages (at least as spoken by the English-educated middle class) are heavily influenced by English. Similar to how the Philippines are just called the Philippines (or Pilipinas, the closest approximation that is pronounceable in Tagalog), rather than a native-language name.
Not sure if it's a trend already that some countries are trying to exert more control over their own names, but I noticed the same with Belarus a few years ago. It used to be called "White Russia" in german, but at some point, the name vanished from both press articles and official publications and was replaced with Belarus. According to Wikipedia, there was a german government decision to change the official usage of the name, co-initiated by the Belarusian government. (This was before the war, so I assume the relations weren't yet as icy as they are today)
Funnily, the actual pronunciation is easier now, and it (to me) sounds 99% close to Turkia. I don't get why they went with such complicated letter sequence for such a straightforward word. Though both languages are not native to me, so I may be wrong. But I was baffled this year, after discovering that incomprehensible Türkiye is actually Turkia.
Because they want to be known as Türkiye and have been actively requesting. The United Nations officially agreed to recognize the country's new name in 2022.
They don't, and nobody's patrolling the Internet to smack people who say Turkey. But in many areas of the world, names of places can be intensely politicized, so organizations like the article source ("the energy dedicated portal that aims to deliver up-to-date news and analysis across the energy agenda in 20+ countries in Central and Southeastern Europe") prefer as a matter of style to conform to official pronouncements. If they'd been around in 2019, they would have talked a lot about "FYROM" or "the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia": an incredibly unwieldly name, one that has probably never been used colloquially, but was necessary in order to avoid taking sides between Greece and the country now known as North Macedonia.
I don't understand why so many people are so quick to interpret things as some kind of boot on their neck. The official names of places change - they're proper nouns. Nobody is invoking authority to control how you write the names of places.
To be fair, Erdogen is a literal boots-on-neck dictator and this entire spectacle is just another distraction / demonstration of political capita he is using to cling to power.
Nor does it even make sense. All languages have names for countries, that are not the true names of those countries. Its normal. Especially when Turkey's desired diacritics can't even be typed on our keyboards. Is it reasonable for Israel to say we must type the name with Hebrew characters? And suddenly we have to guess WTF news agencies are talking about.
The point of languages is to be understood, this is making it harder to understand to appease some authoritarian loser.
If Turkey were offensive, that's one thing. But it's not and there's no reason for it.
Can you remind me which language is the official language of the country called UN? I'd like to pass a C1 UN-language test so I can apply for UN-citizenship.
If the people of that nation want their nation called something specific, cool. If they want to adopt/use the Anglicized version of their country's name, also cool. It's up to the people in that country, I guess.
No, it is not. How English is spoken is determined collectively by the community of English-speakers, not by the Turkish government.
There is also the pretty major issue that native English speakers cannot even pronounce "Türkiye", nor easily type it. That's why use an English word for it, not a Turkish word -- because we speak English, not Turkish.
As a native english speaker, personally I have zero problem with this change. If the Turkish government was actually demanding other languages change the name that'd be weird, but its a request not a demand.
> There is also the pretty major issue that native English speakers cannot even pronounce "Türkiye", nor easily type it.
Skill issue. I don't speak Turkish either, but it takes all of two minutes to look up and learn the pronunciation and how to type an umlaut over a U with a simple alt code. I mean, come on. The Turkish government isn't asking everyone to convert to Islam and get to a conversational level with the language, just say their country's name how they think it should be said. If a nation can't even ask of the world to do such a simple thing without native English speakers getting bent out of shape over it, then it might be time for some serious self-reflection.
But hey, downvote away if it makes you feel any better.
> I don't speak Turkish either, but it takes all of two minutes to look up and learn the pronunciation
I really doubt that you are pronouncing it correctly. The word Türkiye contains multiple sounds that don't exist in English.
If you don't actually speak Turkish, you are surely just using some Anglicized approximate pronunciation, and in that case, why not just use the actual English word?
You do know that you can learn to make new sounds with your mouth, tongue and vocal chords right? You are aware that just because a particular language does not use a phoneme that does not eliminate your ability to reproduce it? I have a lot of fun learning how to make sounds and pronounce things properly from different languages, my latest being Danish, which is proving difficult but certainly far from impossible. Perhaps you should try it, sometime?
Despite your otherwise quality contributions to HN, you're coming off as a bit insane here. I hope you understand that, which is why I will continue to badger my point; there is no reason they can't ask that people use their preferred name. None. The only thing you do by continuing to argue against that point is push your own Anglicize-all-the-things notion of the world, which is certainly not shared by all, not even remotely.
> You do know that you can learn to make new sounds with your mouth, tongue and vocal chords right?
Of course. I speak French at a pretty high level (the accent has gotten worse from disuse but in 2007 most people in France couldn't tell I was foreign); nevertheless, when I say "France" (while speaking English), I pronounce it the American way, not the French way, because switching to a different language for one word in your sentence would sound silly.
And that gets to why the purported Türkiye change bothers me: it's not even really a different name; it's pretty much the same name, only pronounced and spelled in Turkish rather than in English. Most name changes are done for some more serious purpose, like to resolve a genuinely important political dispute (in the case of Macedonia becoming North Macedonia), to make the name better fit English place naming conventions and actually be easier to say in English (Czech Republic to Czechia), to assert independence by discarding a foreign name imposed by former colonial masters (Swaziland to Eswatini), or to switch away from a totally different name in a foreign language used by the people who used to live there centuries ago (Constantinople to Istanbul). Or they happened long enough ago that the new name is established and I can't muster the energy to resist it now (Burma to Myanmar).
None of these reasons apply to Turkey; the purported name change is just a demand that everybody start using Turkish sounds and letters for the same name. Given the ideology of the person calling for this change (Erdogan), I can only conclude that it's entirely driven by a puerile sense of nationalism: "let's prove how strong we are by forcing everyone to use our language, if only for this one word!" It sounds ridiculous when put that way, but Erdogan is indeed a ridiculous person.
> The only thing you do by continuing to argue against that point is push your own Anglicize-all-the-things notion of the world, which is certainly not shared by all, not even remotely.
Well, it doesn't really have to do specifically with anglicization. English-speakers should continue calling it Turkey, French-speakers Turquie, German-speakers die Türkei, and so on.
Edit: to be clear, if I ever meet a real Turkish person who actually cares about this, I'll probably call it whatever they prefer, at least around them, out of politeness. But this has yet to happen. Every Turkish person I know still just calls it Turkey in English.
The Germany/Deutschland/Alemannia/Niemcy situation is utter garbage and its existence is a curse upon this world, not justification to do it to other countries, too.
Türkiye is Türkiye because it self-identifies as such.
Every country has rare earth elements. Just google "X discovers rare earth" where X is your country of choice and you'll find articles about how they have huge deposits. The underlying problem is the processing. China has figured this out and has cornered the market. Until other countries figure out how to process these materials, China will be able to leverage this capability to their advantage.
Not every country has economically extractable heavy rare earths, resource =/= reserve. X discovers rare earth is the same as X discovers plants, and then assume every country can build a robust biofuel economy. Reminder PRC has the MOST shale deposits in the world, they're just buried very deep and economically AND technically not productive to extract at scale.
PRC's main choke hold is HeavyREE, more specifically processing of ionic clays that is GEOGRAPHICALLY SCARCE like economically extractable oil deposits, which enables economic leeching of heavy strategic rare earth AT SCALE. Think hunting whales for blubber vs drilling oil, supports entirely different tiers of proliferation and use. At scale is key, west never used HREEs at scale until PRC commoditized them by exploiting specific geology mostly limited to south PRC, Myanmar, parts of Brazil but deposits now also found in Australia because Australia has everything. So the real question is can long will it take AU+co to discover and build the entire HREE infra based on deposit types only PRC has real experience with.
It's have nothing to do with "figuring it out". Both mining and processing been figured out decades ago. But rare earth mining is disaster for ecology and western countries just don't want to pay the tall and deal with political consequences. Countries like China and Russia have advantage the they can do whatever they want without caring about protests or long term effects on population of regions where mining occurs.
There quite few talks on the topic, but you can check this one by Dr. Julie Klinger of University of Delaware:
If they don’t even have the refining infrastructure built yet what do they have to offer the US ( or any other nation) that we can’t get from China? Rare Earth isn’t actually rare, what’s rare is the ability to refine it into pure elements.
as stated many times before, rare earth mining isn't a major issue, capacity to process into something useful which requires tons of water and toxic chemicals is the real issue for the US since China controls lion's share of the market.
In the English language, we need to stop spelling Turkiye as Türkiye. Note that I did not revert to the old spelling of Turkey. English does not have ü as a character. We spell all other countries using the A-Za-z character set, and no exception should be made for Turkiye. It doesn't matter how they want it spelled. If tomorrow they want it spelled Ṫüřḳïýe or Ĵăƥȃn̈ or Ǥëŗṁāņẙ, we should not have to oblige.
It's unrelated, but this spelling of Turkey makes me irrationally angry. I don't see why I should be expected to change my language to suit the whims of nationalists when they don't call Greece "Ellada" or Armenia "Hayastan" in Turkish.
Correct, and this is the latest in a serious of decisions made by Türkiye which imperil NATO's collective defense.
Rare earths are vital for military equipment. This action is coming from a country that NATO has trusted with its best technology and they continue to flirt with both Russia and China, NATO's primary threats.
Do you see how my comment is about the impact on NATO's ability to wage war? What if Türkiye begins sharing military secrets with China? They are working with China on the mine referenced in the article. They are not trustworthy.
I can only laugh at this statement. There are way many events where usa did act like an not trustworthy. Maybe you should start asking questions like “why my allies seeking external alliances, am I doing something wrong”
what's left of it after it's dismantlement you mean? it isn't much of an alliance now. and if it is going to be used to twist arms in trade disagreements, it is already dead.
You want to kick them out of NATO because the USA and Turkey currently do not have a trade agreement on rare earth elements? Because that's what you are claiming.
Türkiye is a highly effective arms manufacturer and is pretty aligned with NATO most of the time. They've been one of the more surprisingly strong supporters of Ukraine. They shot down a Russian jet a few years ago just to emphasize FAFO.
Yes they have their specific regional interests they will emphasize even when they offend NATO sensibilities, like giving Armenia the finger in their war with Azerbaijan, but that is not a major cost compared to what they give the US and EU strategically.
Yes, this is what I mean. Should the US sacrifice the security of Europe to make a (pointless) statement about Syrian internal politics? Frankly, it's unreasonable for Turkey to not have an opinion about the PKK. If there was a comparable terror group in Mexico, the US would absolutely be doing airstrikes!
Punishing Turkey over this will accomplish nothing and sabotage the relationship. The US already had a reasonable plan in Syria, supporting the non-PKK elements while maneuvering towards a political reunification.
I should blame the Russians then for introducing stupid acronyms into English language.
It is not nice to use the word f!@k in a public forum, but wrapping it in a dumb acronym is just fine.
I'd term it "theopolitical" more than "geopolitical"... which is both more ominous and closer to the truth IMHO. One particular dusty-book-infused worldview, for example, can cite an order of magnitude more xenophobic and violent passages directed towards specifically-named outsider-followers of certain other dusty-book-infused worldviews than all the others, for example.
It's exceptional because it was primarily the coastal nations' race to capture free land, and benefit from that for hundreds of years, not because they're intrinsically superior as a collective. US had a chance to develop fast far away from wars, and they managed it. Other nations can't do anything about it, just like workers can't do much about capital owners keeping them _down_. Doesn't mean that they don't have any right to stand up for themselves.
Yeah how dare the US maintain maritime security across the world, pay for an outsized share of security, and give more aid than any other country on earth bringing unprecedented prosperity to the world bringing billions out of poverty. US should have sat back and let the communists win, that turned out so good.
Whatever US is securing, is directly tied to its own growth machine. Let's not overlook the fact that US has been funding right-of-center, often far-right, politics overseas for decades, and aiding THOSE governments. Covertly preventing progressive movements worldwide doesn't seem as benevolent to me as you portrait it to be.
Numerous civilizations in history brought then-unprecedented prosperity to humanity. At the end of the day, nations that they oppressed under the name of being the big brother, rose against them. How dare they, right?
Please stop. Erdogan is not in charge of what things are called in English, and Turkey has been called Turkey for hundreds of years. Calling it "Türkiye" would be as silly as switching to calling Germany "Deutschland" tomorrow because it tickles Friedrich Merz's nationalist pride.
Maybe you guys should redefine who is your allies and enemies. Since the last one year or so even your allies feel like they are your enemies anyway. Tell me, who do you not have a beef with atm?
The ones who are like "man, fight alone and we'll mock you for military spending" - are not. The ones who are like "yo we kinda support you in a fight, but we'll also pump money into your enemy" - are not either.
But I sorta agree to your point, current administration screw up their allies really hard, although I see it more like very bitter pill that hurts before healing.
I don’t see the USA fighting together with Turkey in any area tbh. Turkey handled the Syria situation single handedly while getting blocked on F35 deals. From this side of the ocean, it looks like the bad brother has been the USA, not the other way around. Saying that, I hate our administration, too…
You want to modify the membership of a military treaty because of decision about who they sell metal to? There might be a convincing case to do what you're saying, but it's not at all obvious from the current context
Rare earths are vital for military equipment. This action is coming from a country that NATO has trusted with its best technology and they continue to flirt with both Russia and China, NATO's primary threats.
No. The US kicked NATO member Türkiye out of the F-35 program and denied them F-16 upgrades for a long time[1]. And the EU has denied Türkiye membership supposedly because they're not fully part of Europe (among other issues) while courting Georgia which is farther east. Türkiye is treated as a frenemy by the west. Good on them for making their own way.
military alliance is related to trade dispute..how?
The US needs them more than they need the US. They're strategically placed at the bosphorous containing russia's western advances and containing the baltics. Ukraine would be the next best thing, but they're not in NATO.
You want to kick them out of NATO because the USA and Turkey have failed to come to a trade agreement on rare earth elements? Because that's what this is about. We have no agreement, so they aren't selling to us.
From Turkey:
> Responding to the allegations that 'rare earth elements are sold to the USA', Bayraktar said that there is absolutely no such thing. Bayraktar said, "The agreement we made and signed in America was also a nuclear-related agreement. If we had done it about rare earth elements, be sure, they would have declared it too, we would have declared it," he said.
That seems more like a rununciation of rumors and making it clear neither the US or Turkey have established a trade agreement for this.
Both this article and its source are misrepresenting the actual quote. Its seems to be about rumors that rare earth minerals are being sold now.
>Responding to the allegations that 'rare earth elements are sold to the USA', Bayraktar said that there is absolutely no such thing. Bayraktar said, "The agreement we made and signed in America was also a nuclear-related agreement. If we had done it about rare earth elements, be sure, they would have declared it too, we would have declared it," he said.
Yep, this is about local politics. It is customary in Turkish politics to discover vast natural resources from time to time and promise that good times are ahead if you vote for Erdogan one more time(this field was discovered months before the 2023 elections).
They are often exaggerated, although resources exist. There's a meme from the previous election cycle about a pro-Erdogan TV personality celebrating the natural gas reserves discovered before elections instructing citizens to open the windows and run the boilers even if its a hot day because Turkey is now a natural gas boss.
The Turkish state isn't shy from selling access to these resources to foreign companies but this often leads to scandals and environmental disasters. Last year SSR mining, a Canadian company, had a huge mine collapse. Also, there are issues about cutting down forests to access mines that creates a lot of trouble for the government as it leads to widespread protests.
So what's the minister is actually saying is that Don't worry we are not going to sell it to foreign companies that will ruin the environment this time in response to rumours that they are going to sell it. But in Turkey, nobody remembers anything so anything can happen.
Off-Topic: Why Türkiye? Why not keep using Turkey in English?
I know they changed their name to Türkiye, but why would we change it in our languages? We still use Germany instead of Deutschland, India instead of Bharat, and Italy instead of Italia.
So why make an exception for Turkey?
Yeah, I'm from Turkey and it's really annoying for me to use a keyboard shortcuts to select "Türkiye" from dropdowns using year old "T", "U", "R" keys. Now in some websites it's "Turkey" and in some websites it's "Türkiye" I need to switch keyboard layouts just to select my country name.
Even though, website doesn't let me use my actual name since my name has non ascii characters so I need to try many times.
This reminds me of my own struggles in locating my country in various dropdowns. Sometimes it‘s the trivial to find Austria, but sometimes Österreich under O and other times Österreich under Ö (sorted to the very bottom). Collation is fun!
I feel your pain, looking at 'The Netherlands', 'Netherlands/Nederland', Holland, and even once 'Kingdom of The Netherlands'
"Following an official letter submitted to the United Nations by the Republic of Türkiye, the country's name has been officially changed to Türkiye at the UN.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said that a letter had been received on June 1 from the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Cavuşoğlu addressed to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, requesting the use of “Türkiye” instead of “Turkey” for all affairs." [1]
"Foreign Minister Cavuşoğlu said in a tweet that the move would "increase our country's brand value".
The country’s English language public broadcaster TRT World said, the move would help to disassociate the country’s image from the large bird of the same name."[2]
[1] https://turkiye.un.org/en/184798-turkeys-name-changed-t%C3%B... [2] https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/turkey-or-turkiye-why-th...
> help to disassociate the country’s image from the large bird of the same name.
So easily done - what? You are going to roast a whole country? You are going on holiday in huge bird?
[dead]
So what? The UN does not have the power to redefine what words mean in the English language, and neither does the Republic of Turkey. If Germany submitted an official letter somewhere purporting to change its English name to Deutschland, you should also not listen to them.
Why the hostility? It's not like they changed the name of the Black Sea to the Sea of Turkey. It's not a "fuck you" move. Just keep spelling it the old way if you care for some reason.
> Why the hostility?
Because the attempted name change is being done purely to stroke the ego of a right-wing authoritarian nationalist strongman. Attempts by such people to remake language according to their whims should be resisted whenever possible.
> It's not like they changed the name of the Black Sea to the Sea of Turkey.
I'm sure Erdogan would do just that if there were any realistic possibility that anybody would actually follow it. The "Türkiye" name change is as much as he thinks he can get away with.
Exactly my point. And it doesn't apply only to English. There are 200+ languages and 8+ billion people in the world, and none of them is obliged to change the way they talk because someone doesn't like what a specific word means in one of those languages.
As a Turkish person I used to agree with you. Not anymore. My people don't want to be associated with an ugly bird and I respect that. Also we don't want an exception. We're ready to use Bharat, Deutschland or any other name in our language if those nations want that. Same for the city names. It's about respecting those countries and their people.
Fun fact: India is Hindistan in Turkish which literally means Land of Turkeys. Maybe we should really change. Bharat means spice which is a better name.
It's a great bird.. in fact Benjamin Franklin proposed that it be the American bird. The bald eagle was chosen for whatever reason over that
India's main official name is India. Bharat (from Sanskrit) is coequal according to the constitution, and Hindustan (from Persian) is also sometimes used.
That's mostly because English is one of the two official languages of India, and even the local native languages (at least as spoken by the English-educated middle class) are heavily influenced by English. Similar to how the Philippines are just called the Philippines (or Pilipinas, the closest approximation that is pronounceable in Tagalog), rather than a native-language name.
Turkiye is okay but Türkiye is not (in English).
Not sure if it's a trend already that some countries are trying to exert more control over their own names, but I noticed the same with Belarus a few years ago. It used to be called "White Russia" in german, but at some point, the name vanished from both press articles and official publications and was replaced with Belarus. According to Wikipedia, there was a german government decision to change the official usage of the name, co-initiated by the Belarusian government. (This was before the war, so I assume the relations weren't yet as icy as they are today)
https://dgo-online.org/informieren/aktuelles/belarusisch-deu...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210924060241/https://geschicht... (in German)
Which is kind of funny, since Belarus means exactly Whiterussia.
Funnily, the actual pronunciation is easier now, and it (to me) sounds 99% close to Turkia. I don't get why they went with such complicated letter sequence for such a straightforward word. Though both languages are not native to me, so I may be wrong. But I was baffled this year, after discovering that incomprehensible Türkiye is actually Turkia.
PS: I'm going from this this video as a basis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYjVIaZA14c
Do we?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=T%C3%BCrki... (US)
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=T%C3%BCrkiye,Turk... (global)
Some noise in the global trend recently (any guesses?) but does not seem like a huge adjustment.
It's because Erdogan is in charge and he's throwing his weight around because he knows he holds the cards on a number of geopolitical issues.
We're laying the groundwork to globally search/replace "India" to "Bharat."
Looking forward to my next long flight where I can watch movies about Bharatna Jones.
You don't want to make the Sultan mad. If he gets mad, he won't sell you rare earths.
All jokes aside, I'm pretty sure both are still used. Non Turks still use Turkey.
Because they want to be known as Türkiye and have been actively requesting. The United Nations officially agreed to recognize the country's new name in 2022.
The UN does not have the power to determine how the English language is spoken and written.
They don't, and nobody's patrolling the Internet to smack people who say Turkey. But in many areas of the world, names of places can be intensely politicized, so organizations like the article source ("the energy dedicated portal that aims to deliver up-to-date news and analysis across the energy agenda in 20+ countries in Central and Southeastern Europe") prefer as a matter of style to conform to official pronouncements. If they'd been around in 2019, they would have talked a lot about "FYROM" or "the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia": an incredibly unwieldly name, one that has probably never been used colloquially, but was necessary in order to avoid taking sides between Greece and the country now known as North Macedonia.
The diacritics are a bit annoying to type but if they've asked to be called Turkiye why not call them Turkiye?
What kind of authority do they have over my language?
I don't understand why so many people are so quick to interpret things as some kind of boot on their neck. The official names of places change - they're proper nouns. Nobody is invoking authority to control how you write the names of places.
To be fair, Erdogen is a literal boots-on-neck dictator and this entire spectacle is just another distraction / demonstration of political capita he is using to cling to power.
Nor does it even make sense. All languages have names for countries, that are not the true names of those countries. Its normal. Especially when Turkey's desired diacritics can't even be typed on our keyboards. Is it reasonable for Israel to say we must type the name with Hebrew characters? And suddenly we have to guess WTF news agencies are talking about.
The point of languages is to be understood, this is making it harder to understand to appease some authoritarian loser.
If Turkey were offensive, that's one thing. But it's not and there's no reason for it.
Not an American news agency - they're probably following a European standard.
I think they changed it in the UN or something. Theoretically their name never changed as most of their neighbors always called them Turkia.
Can you remind me which language is the official language of the country called UN? I'd like to pass a C1 UN-language test so I can apply for UN-citizenship.
Because we are born to be exceptional.
Respect?
If the people of that nation want their nation called something specific, cool. If they want to adopt/use the Anglicized version of their country's name, also cool. It's up to the people in that country, I guess.
Plus, you know, gobble gobble.
> It's up to the people in that country, I guess
No, it is not. How English is spoken is determined collectively by the community of English-speakers, not by the Turkish government.
There is also the pretty major issue that native English speakers cannot even pronounce "Türkiye", nor easily type it. That's why use an English word for it, not a Turkish word -- because we speak English, not Turkish.
As a native english speaker, personally I have zero problem with this change. If the Turkish government was actually demanding other languages change the name that'd be weird, but its a request not a demand.
> There is also the pretty major issue that native English speakers cannot even pronounce "Türkiye", nor easily type it.
Skill issue. I don't speak Turkish either, but it takes all of two minutes to look up and learn the pronunciation and how to type an umlaut over a U with a simple alt code. I mean, come on. The Turkish government isn't asking everyone to convert to Islam and get to a conversational level with the language, just say their country's name how they think it should be said. If a nation can't even ask of the world to do such a simple thing without native English speakers getting bent out of shape over it, then it might be time for some serious self-reflection.
But hey, downvote away if it makes you feel any better.
> I don't speak Turkish either, but it takes all of two minutes to look up and learn the pronunciation
I really doubt that you are pronouncing it correctly. The word Türkiye contains multiple sounds that don't exist in English.
If you don't actually speak Turkish, you are surely just using some Anglicized approximate pronunciation, and in that case, why not just use the actual English word?
You do know that you can learn to make new sounds with your mouth, tongue and vocal chords right? You are aware that just because a particular language does not use a phoneme that does not eliminate your ability to reproduce it? I have a lot of fun learning how to make sounds and pronounce things properly from different languages, my latest being Danish, which is proving difficult but certainly far from impossible. Perhaps you should try it, sometime?
Despite your otherwise quality contributions to HN, you're coming off as a bit insane here. I hope you understand that, which is why I will continue to badger my point; there is no reason they can't ask that people use their preferred name. None. The only thing you do by continuing to argue against that point is push your own Anglicize-all-the-things notion of the world, which is certainly not shared by all, not even remotely.
> You do know that you can learn to make new sounds with your mouth, tongue and vocal chords right?
Of course. I speak French at a pretty high level (the accent has gotten worse from disuse but in 2007 most people in France couldn't tell I was foreign); nevertheless, when I say "France" (while speaking English), I pronounce it the American way, not the French way, because switching to a different language for one word in your sentence would sound silly.
And that gets to why the purported Türkiye change bothers me: it's not even really a different name; it's pretty much the same name, only pronounced and spelled in Turkish rather than in English. Most name changes are done for some more serious purpose, like to resolve a genuinely important political dispute (in the case of Macedonia becoming North Macedonia), to make the name better fit English place naming conventions and actually be easier to say in English (Czech Republic to Czechia), to assert independence by discarding a foreign name imposed by former colonial masters (Swaziland to Eswatini), or to switch away from a totally different name in a foreign language used by the people who used to live there centuries ago (Constantinople to Istanbul). Or they happened long enough ago that the new name is established and I can't muster the energy to resist it now (Burma to Myanmar).
None of these reasons apply to Turkey; the purported name change is just a demand that everybody start using Turkish sounds and letters for the same name. Given the ideology of the person calling for this change (Erdogan), I can only conclude that it's entirely driven by a puerile sense of nationalism: "let's prove how strong we are by forcing everyone to use our language, if only for this one word!" It sounds ridiculous when put that way, but Erdogan is indeed a ridiculous person.
> The only thing you do by continuing to argue against that point is push your own Anglicize-all-the-things notion of the world, which is certainly not shared by all, not even remotely.
Well, it doesn't really have to do specifically with anglicization. English-speakers should continue calling it Turkey, French-speakers Turquie, German-speakers die Türkei, and so on.
Edit: to be clear, if I ever meet a real Turkish person who actually cares about this, I'll probably call it whatever they prefer, at least around them, out of politeness. But this has yet to happen. Every Turkish person I know still just calls it Turkey in English.
The Germany/Deutschland/Alemannia/Niemcy situation is utter garbage and its existence is a curse upon this world, not justification to do it to other countries, too.
Türkiye is Türkiye because it self-identifies as such.
I think just for kicks some group should start lobbying for the US to be called "Columbia" again.
Every country has rare earth elements. Just google "X discovers rare earth" where X is your country of choice and you'll find articles about how they have huge deposits. The underlying problem is the processing. China has figured this out and has cornered the market. Until other countries figure out how to process these materials, China will be able to leverage this capability to their advantage.
Not every country has economically extractable heavy rare earths, resource =/= reserve. X discovers rare earth is the same as X discovers plants, and then assume every country can build a robust biofuel economy. Reminder PRC has the MOST shale deposits in the world, they're just buried very deep and economically AND technically not productive to extract at scale.
PRC's main choke hold is HeavyREE, more specifically processing of ionic clays that is GEOGRAPHICALLY SCARCE like economically extractable oil deposits, which enables economic leeching of heavy strategic rare earth AT SCALE. Think hunting whales for blubber vs drilling oil, supports entirely different tiers of proliferation and use. At scale is key, west never used HREEs at scale until PRC commoditized them by exploiting specific geology mostly limited to south PRC, Myanmar, parts of Brazil but deposits now also found in Australia because Australia has everything. So the real question is can long will it take AU+co to discover and build the entire HREE infra based on deposit types only PRC has real experience with.
It's have nothing to do with "figuring it out". Both mining and processing been figured out decades ago. But rare earth mining is disaster for ecology and western countries just don't want to pay the tall and deal with political consequences. Countries like China and Russia have advantage the they can do whatever they want without caring about protests or long term effects on population of regions where mining occurs.
There quite few talks on the topic, but you can check this one by Dr. Julie Klinger of University of Delaware:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGQeXrkCqM0
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Forever playing both sides of the fence.
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If they don’t even have the refining infrastructure built yet what do they have to offer the US ( or any other nation) that we can’t get from China? Rare Earth isn’t actually rare, what’s rare is the ability to refine it into pure elements.
The us has tons of rare earth ores, it's the refining the US lacks mostly because it's a nasty process that creates a lot of toxic waste.
…and we (USA) didn't give the Kurds their deserved autonomous nation as thanks for their help in Iraq to avoid pissing off the Turks.
Is the land yours to give?
Seems like this is talking about not allowing the US to own the deposits or processing - as opposed to not selling the output to the US?
Anyone know if that is correct?
as stated many times before, rare earth mining isn't a major issue, capacity to process into something useful which requires tons of water and toxic chemicals is the real issue for the US since China controls lion's share of the market.
At the same time, Canada pushes their extraction project https://www.mining-technology.com/news/canada-fast-track-cri...
In the English language, we need to stop spelling Turkiye as Türkiye. Note that I did not revert to the old spelling of Turkey. English does not have ü as a character. We spell all other countries using the A-Za-z character set, and no exception should be made for Turkiye. It doesn't matter how they want it spelled. If tomorrow they want it spelled Ṫüřḳïýe or Ĵăƥȃn̈ or Ǥëŗṁāņẙ, we should not have to oblige.
It's unrelated, but this spelling of Turkey makes me irrationally angry. I don't see why I should be expected to change my language to suit the whims of nationalists when they don't call Greece "Ellada" or Armenia "Hayastan" in Turkish.
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NATO is a defensive alliance, not a trade organization.
Correct, and this is the latest in a serious of decisions made by Türkiye which imperil NATO's collective defense.
Rare earths are vital for military equipment. This action is coming from a country that NATO has trusted with its best technology and they continue to flirt with both Russia and China, NATO's primary threats.
Do you see how my comment is about the impact on NATO's ability to wage war? What if Türkiye begins sharing military secrets with China? They are working with China on the mine referenced in the article. They are not trustworthy.
I can only laugh at this statement. There are way many events where usa did act like an not trustworthy. Maybe you should start asking questions like “why my allies seeking external alliances, am I doing something wrong”
Apparently, rare metals are becoming critical for defence industry.
what's left of it after it's dismantlement you mean? it isn't much of an alliance now. and if it is going to be used to twist arms in trade disagreements, it is already dead.
While it has its challenges, it is not dead.
He didn't say that either. He said that if you start to tie trade deals to nato membership, like you are suggesting, that it's dead.
You want to kick them out of NATO because the USA and Turkey currently do not have a trade agreement on rare earth elements? Because that's what you are claiming.
Türkiye is a highly effective arms manufacturer and is pretty aligned with NATO most of the time. They've been one of the more surprisingly strong supporters of Ukraine. They shot down a Russian jet a few years ago just to emphasize FAFO.
Yes they have their specific regional interests they will emphasize even when they offend NATO sensibilities, like giving Armenia the finger in their war with Azerbaijan, but that is not a major cost compared to what they give the US and EU strategically.
"when they offend NATO sensibilities, like giving Armenia the finger in their war"
Or when they support islamists in Syria against the kurds and annect illegally parts of it. Who cares about those things nowdays anyway.
But if we want NATO to not just be a military force, but something something freedom and human rights, maybe we should care more about it.
Who has ever wanted that?
Yes, this is what I mean. Should the US sacrifice the security of Europe to make a (pointless) statement about Syrian internal politics? Frankly, it's unreasonable for Turkey to not have an opinion about the PKK. If there was a comparable terror group in Mexico, the US would absolutely be doing airstrikes!
Punishing Turkey over this will accomplish nothing and sabotage the relationship. The US already had a reasonable plan in Syria, supporting the non-PKK elements while maneuvering towards a political reunification.
FAFO? Yet another moronic acronym of the day. Jeez...
This is a perfectly reasonable acronym to describe how Russia violates their neighbors' airspace just to push boundaries and be irritating.
I should blame the Russians then for introducing stupid acronyms into English language. It is not nice to use the word f!@k in a public forum, but wrapping it in a dumb acronym is just fine.
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> US hasn't done much for its "allies", either, no matter the party in power.
Except for paying for the lion's share of whatever "agreements" and "accords" are entered into. ::shrug::
That will come to an end in due course when the world moves away from the dollar.
It's already started, will take a few more years.
Good luck with the Yuan.
Allies shouldn't align with their block's primary geopolitical enemies...
I'd term it "theopolitical" more than "geopolitical"... which is both more ominous and closer to the truth IMHO. One particular dusty-book-infused worldview, for example, can cite an order of magnitude more xenophobic and violent passages directed towards specifically-named outsider-followers of certain other dusty-book-infused worldviews than all the others, for example.
Eh. I can see how MAGAing it up to 11 might lead to some shifting of those blocks in a complicated world.
Israel has entered the chat.
> It's appalling to see the untamed American exceptionalism in the comments.
If America wasn't exceptional you wouldn't be reduced to whining about Americans observing facts. You'd be able to do something about it.
It's exceptional because it was primarily the coastal nations' race to capture free land, and benefit from that for hundreds of years, not because they're intrinsically superior as a collective. US had a chance to develop fast far away from wars, and they managed it. Other nations can't do anything about it, just like workers can't do much about capital owners keeping them _down_. Doesn't mean that they don't have any right to stand up for themselves.
Yeah how dare the US maintain maritime security across the world, pay for an outsized share of security, and give more aid than any other country on earth bringing unprecedented prosperity to the world bringing billions out of poverty. US should have sat back and let the communists win, that turned out so good.
Whatever US is securing, is directly tied to its own growth machine. Let's not overlook the fact that US has been funding right-of-center, often far-right, politics overseas for decades, and aiding THOSE governments. Covertly preventing progressive movements worldwide doesn't seem as benevolent to me as you portrait it to be.
Numerous civilizations in history brought then-unprecedented prosperity to humanity. At the end of the day, nations that they oppressed under the name of being the big brother, rose against them. How dare they, right?
> Türkiye
Please stop. Erdogan is not in charge of what things are called in English, and Turkey has been called Turkey for hundreds of years. Calling it "Türkiye" would be as silly as switching to calling Germany "Deutschland" tomorrow because it tickles Friedrich Merz's nationalist pride.
Good news is that with allies like this we don't need enemies!
Maybe you guys should redefine who is your allies and enemies. Since the last one year or so even your allies feel like they are your enemies anyway. Tell me, who do you not have a beef with atm?
We seem to be very good friends with Saudi Arabia and Qatar now.
“tell me who your friends are so that I can tell who you are” is a Turkish saying, dear “burka man”
Allies are those who fight together.
The ones who are like "man, fight alone and we'll mock you for military spending" - are not. The ones who are like "yo we kinda support you in a fight, but we'll also pump money into your enemy" - are not either.
But I sorta agree to your point, current administration screw up their allies really hard, although I see it more like very bitter pill that hurts before healing.
BTW I'm not 'merican, I'm from Canada.
I don’t see the USA fighting together with Turkey in any area tbh. Turkey handled the Syria situation single handedly while getting blocked on F35 deals. From this side of the ocean, it looks like the bad brother has been the USA, not the other way around. Saying that, I hate our administration, too…
The sheer hypocrisy of this comment is absolutely mindbending
I have a feeling the comment you are replying to is sarcasm, not to be taken literally.
Why did you find it hypocritical?
Why is this in the "hacker" news?
The lack of rare earths could pretty much collapse the entire US' electronics industry.
It feels like it's time to kick this country out of nato.
This doesn't really seem like an appropriate response to what amounts to a trade policy dispute, and one that sounds like it can be resolved.
You want to modify the membership of a military treaty because of decision about who they sell metal to? There might be a convincing case to do what you're saying, but it's not at all obvious from the current context
Rare earths are vital for military equipment. This action is coming from a country that NATO has trusted with its best technology and they continue to flirt with both Russia and China, NATO's primary threats.
"Trusted with its best technology"
No. The US kicked NATO member Türkiye out of the F-35 program and denied them F-16 upgrades for a long time[1]. And the EU has denied Türkiye membership supposedly because they're not fully part of Europe (among other issues) while courting Georgia which is farther east. Türkiye is treated as a frenemy by the west. Good on them for making their own way.
[1] https://balkaneu.com/turkeys-f-16-deal-stalls-as-focus-shift...
military alliance is related to trade dispute..how?
The US needs them more than they need the US. They're strategically placed at the bosphorous containing russia's western advances and containing the baltics. Ukraine would be the next best thing, but they're not in NATO.
Honestly, the US doesn't need Türkiye. Europe does.
Are you aware that Turkey is the biggest NATO force on this side of ocean?
You want to kick them out of NATO because the USA and Turkey have failed to come to a trade agreement on rare earth elements? Because that's what this is about. We have no agreement, so they aren't selling to us.
From Turkey:
> Responding to the allegations that 'rare earth elements are sold to the USA', Bayraktar said that there is absolutely no such thing. Bayraktar said, "The agreement we made and signed in America was also a nuclear-related agreement. If we had done it about rare earth elements, be sure, they would have declared it too, we would have declared it," he said.
That seems more like a rununciation of rumors and making it clear neither the US or Turkey have established a trade agreement for this.