Why should Turkey be allowed to change its name?

Turkey has told the UN it wants to be called Türkiye. Even when it is written in capitals, it would still like the little dot over the i, thank you, as İ. Exports will now bear the label ‘Made in Türkiye’ instead of ‘Made in Turkey’.

Turkey is of course a name for a delicious bird – at first labelled the guinea fowl, until the New World creature was discovered. But the country’s state broadcaster TRT World complains that dictionaries also define turkey as ‘something that fails badly’. There’s worse. The Oxford English Dictionary (in an entry written in 1915, when Britain was at war against Turkey) records under Turk: ‘anyone having qualities historically attributed to Turks; a cruel, rigorous, or tyrannical person; any one behaving barbarically or savagely. Also: a bad-tempered or unmanageable person; a man who treats his wife harshly.’ The Church of England’s Book of Homilies (1563) speaks of the ‘cruelty of the enemy of our Lord Christ, the great Turk’, meaning the Ottoman Sultan, who no longer exists.