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7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Turkiye

earthquake.usgs.gov

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Re: 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Turkiye

#131

Post by midoridensha »

lmz wrote: post #110
midoridensha wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Turkey" is the correct spelling in English. The Turkish government doesn't get to dictate what their country is called in other languages.

Why is this kind of argument valid for countries but not for pronouns?

Don't get me started on the silliness of people inventing completely unique "pronouns" and demanding everyone use them: it completely defeats the linguistic purpose of pronouns. If you want to be referred to a certain way, we already have something for that: it's called a "name". You can name yourself whatever you want.

Anyway, back to your comment: this is a different issue. The pronoun thing is dealing with how people want themselves referred to in their own language, by people they know usually. The Turkey thing is about a government that wants its country called by a different name in a foreign language that it doesn't use.

Re: 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Turkiye

#132

Post by cjensen »

kqr wrote: post #104
cjensen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a prediction that can be evaluated. For example, I could say "there will be a 7+ magnitude quake somewhere in the Pacific Rim tomorrow" and if I publish the same prediction every day it won't be long until my prediction is true. I might even be right the very first time. A real prediction should include exact time period, magnitude, and geographic area. And every prediction made must be documented. This le…

You're missing one important thing: confidence level. You can probably make a 7+ magnitude prediction every day as long as your confidence in it is -- I guess, not knowing much about the Pacific Rim -- less than 1 %. It's the 10 %, 20 %, 50 % confidence level predictions you have to be a bit more sparing with!

I completely agree that a more advanced model would use confidence levels too.

And I forgot to mention this isn't my idea at all. This framing of what is a prediction was invented at USGS. Mea Culpa.

Re: 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Turkiye

#133

Post by kelnos »

duluca wrote: post #116
midoridensha wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Turkey" is the correct spelling in English. The Turkish government doesn't get to dictate what their country is called in other languages.

Lol. Yes they do. There are dozens of instances of names of places being changed due to what the local population wants it to be called. Putting politics aside, disambiguating from the bird turkey is smart from a marketing and tourism sense.

Names of places do certainly change, but that does not dictate how those names are spelled/represented in other languages.

Now, you or anyone else can certainly spell it "Türkiye" instead of "Turkey", but a) you risk confusing people (which you may or may not care about), and b) typing "ü" is awkward on many (most? all?) English-layout keyboards. I suppose you could also spell it "Turkiye", which I suppose is closer to what the Turkish government wants, but is still "incorrect".

At any rate, I personally see little reason to change unless popular usage overwhelmingly changes. At least in the US, popular usage (which influences dictionaries) dictates English spelling, not governments.

Re: 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Turkiye

#134

Post by jacquesm »

_hypx wrote: post #99
jacquesm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked at some of the photographs, the imagery is absolutely devastating. I can't imagine < 1000's of dead.

Hundreds of buildings have collapsed. Even a few thousand will be the best possible news.

More than 1700 buildings have collapsed according to some reports on Twitter.

Re: 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Turkiye

#135

Post by arp242 »

pyuser583 wrote: post #130
jcranmer wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How naïve of you. (Although, technically, that's a diaeresis, not an umlaut.)

What’s the difference? BTW, that spelling is borderline archaic. It’s allowable, but so is “naive,” which is probably better style. I wouldn’t use semi-archiac spellings as a precedent.

Umlaut modifies how a letter is pronounced; diaeresis tells you where a new syllable starts. I'm not sure how to pronounce "u" or "ü" in Turkish.

The problem with naive is that it's not very clear how to pronounce it: it's "na-ive", which isn't very clear. With naïve there's a clear indication that the "i" starts a new syllable.

While I agree that diaeresis in English are more archaic than not, I don't agree it's better style to leave them out. Right now there is, in my opinion, no good way to spell some words: "cooperation" is ambiguous (coo-peration, coop-eration, or co-operation?), "co-operation" looks ugly and is an abuse of the hyphen, and "coöperation" is nice but rather archaic.

A bit of effort to reduce ambiguity and match spelling and pronunciation (as far as the language allows) doesn't strike me as a bad thing.

Re: 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Turkiye

#136

Post by govg »

dizhn wrote: post #73
eyelidlessness wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we can respect the name they prefer, since it’s important enough that they requested international recognition. I’m pretty loosey goosey with my own name and don’t mind if other people are, but I respect when other people don’t feel the same way. I don’t see any reason to insist on disregarding it for a whole country.

Nobody will care about it after Erdoğan is gone. We've been called that for a long time and it never really bothered anybody. We call India "Hindistan" (land of turkeys) ourselves and nobody seems to see the irony there.

You have the cause and effect reversed. Hindustan doesn't mean land of turkeys, it is that the bird is named after the country (Hindustan is a semi official name for India, ultimately both names come from the Indus river) in some languages. In my understanding it is because the bird is actually from the new world, so the existing cultures made up / didn't know where the bird was supposed to be from, and called it "bird from India" in some cases.

Re: 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Turkiye

#137

Post by arp242 »

duluca wrote: post #116
midoridensha wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Turkey" is the correct spelling in English. The Turkish government doesn't get to dictate what their country is called in other languages.

Lol. Yes they do. There are dozens of instances of names of places being changed due to what the local population wants it to be called. Putting politics aside, disambiguating from the bird turkey is smart from a marketing and tourism sense.

Clearly there are limits to what is reasonable though; Vietnam is the common spelling in English, and I think it would be unreasonable to demand everyone spells it as Việt Nam. I can type most diacritics without too much effort, but no idea how to do that ệ double diacritic.

The title on HN actually gets it "wrong" by the way, as it's supposed to be Türkiye, not Turkiye.

Things can have more than one spelling or name, and the "best" one depends on context and personal preference. You can argue from Constantinople to Istanbul about this; but it all seems rather pointless. I wish people would just accept that other people have different preferences. This fits in the "color vs. colour" or "courgette vs. zucchini" category.

Whether Türkiye or Turkiye catches on and becomes the more common spelling? We'll see. I guess it will eventually, but it may take a while.

Re: 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Turkiye

#138

Post by pyuser583 »

arp242 wrote: post #135
pyuser583 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the difference? BTW, that spelling is borderline archaic. It’s allowable, but so is “naive,” which is probably better style. I wouldn’t use semi-archiac spellings as a precedent.

Umlaut modifies how a letter is pronounced; diaeresis tells you where a new syllable starts. I'm not sure how to pronounce "u" or "ü" in Turkish. The problem with naive is that it's not very clear how to pronounce it: it's "na-ive", which isn't very clear. With naïve there's a clear indication that the "i" starts a new syllable. While I agree that diaeresis in English are more archaic than not, I don't agree it's bet…

While it’s not clear how to pronounce “naive” - that’s common in English.

Plenty of English words have little relation between how they are spelled and how they are pronounced.

We don’t usually revert to archaic spellings to solve the matter.

https://www.thoughtco.com/chaos-by-charivarius-gerard-nolst-...

Re: 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Turkiye

#139

Post by midoridensha »

arp242 wrote: post #137
duluca wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. Yes they do. There are dozens of instances of names of places being changed due to what the local population wants it to be called. Putting politics aside, disambiguating from the bird turkey is smart from a marketing and tourism sense.

Clearly there are limits to what is reasonable though; Vietnam is the common spelling in English, and I think it would be unreasonable to demand everyone spells it as Việt Nam. I can type most diacritics without too much effort, but no idea how to do that ệ double diacritic. The title on HN actually gets it "wrong" by the way, as it's supposed to be Türkiye, not Turkiye. Things can have more than one spelling or name…

At least "Vietnam" is somewhat close to the native spelling. I live in Japan, and the English name is nothing at all like the native name (日本, romanized as "nihon"). But you don't see the Japanese government throwing a fit over this. Furthermore, the name in many other languages is the same or much like "Japan": in German, it's spelled the same, but pronounced "yapan" since there's no (English) J sound. What does the Turkish government have to say about the Japanese name for Turkey ("トルコ", romanized as "toruko")? If the Turkish government insisted they spell it "Türkiye", no one here is going to pay attention because none of those characters are part of the Japanese language, nor is that name even pronounceable using the sounds available.

Re: 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Turkiye

#140

Post by arp242 »

pyuser583 wrote: post #138
arp242 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umlaut modifies how a letter is pronounced; diaeresis tells you where a new syllable starts. I'm not sure how to pronounce "u" or "ü" in Turkish. The problem with naive is that it's not very clear how to pronounce it: it's "na-ive", which isn't very clear. With naïve there's a clear indication that the "i" starts a new syllable. While I agree that diaeresis in English are more archaic than not, I don't agree it's bet…

While it’s not clear how to pronounce “naive” - that’s common in English. Plenty of English words have little relation between how they are spelled and how they are pronounced. We don’t usually revert to archaic spellings to solve the matter. https://www.thoughtco.com/chaos-by-charivarius-gerard-nolst-...

While naïve is less common than naive, it is not archaic; it's simply an alternative spelling that's less commonly used.

Actually, to my surprise naïve even seems to be gaining in popularity to the point it's about on-par with naive: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=naive%2Cna%C3%...

And that other words in English have unfortunate spelling is not really a very string argument. You can use this on anything.

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