Summary
Turkey’s soaring inflation, which reached 47% in November, is forcing millions of children into poverty, with many dropping out of school to support their families.
About 7 million Turkish children, or one-third of the population under 18, live in poverty, with families like the Sahins in Istanbul relying on children to scavenge or sell goods to make ends meet.
Rising living costs and inadequate welfare support have deepened child labor and deprivation, creating a “lost generation” trapped in cycles of poverty.
Activists warn of lifelong disadvantages without systemic intervention.
Also, he insists people call it by the name they call it in Turkish and, despite that basically not being something honored in any other country as far as I know, a lot of the English language media went with it.
I’m not seeing them talk about Deutschland or Nippon, so I’m not sure why.
I hear many (different) attempts at saying it the Turkish way.
And to be fair, neither Germany or Japan is the name of an animal.
FWIW, the Japanese almost always call it Nihon these days. Nippon is seen as being nationalistic.
TIL. Thanks.
Why can’t a country (or city, or anythung) choose what others call them?
We call it Timor Leste instead of East Timor. We call it Cote d’Ivoire instead of Ivory Coast. We call it Kyiv instead of Kiev. We call it Russia instead of USSR. All of these are names chosen within the last 50 years or so.
A lot of the “traditional” names are just historical holdovers from a very long time ago. If we encountered them for the first time today, we probably would use their chosen name. If tomorrow they said they wanted to be referred to as Deutschland or Nippon, we’d probably accept that and start calling them by those names.
When that country is ruled by a dictator? Because fuck him.
You mean 日本 ?
They certainly don’t try to do it in the nation’s native alphabet. Imagine if some country demanded that and for some reason half the world’s English-language media started only printing the country’s name that way…
Is the dieresis in Türkiye an accepted English mark?
I can’t think of a native English word that uses it. There are loan words that sometimes are spelled with it like übermensch, but even those are often spelled without it… but on the other hand, I have seen it used by the press in proper names.
I am not against this sort of thing happening organically. I just don’t like it in this specific case mainly because it’s a dictator making a demand and the press caving to it. If there were a popular independent movement by Turks around the English-speaking world to change the name, it would be different. But as far as I know, there is no such thing.