There is no doubt about the pronunciation of the noun for the bird, and that is the very reason why the Turks want the English speaking World to change both the spellintg and the pronunciation.

I wish them luck with that. If Ukraine weren't in the news so much these days, I think most Americans would still think its capital was pronounced "kee-yev".

I don't know what the 'ᵫ' in /tᵫr-kē-ˈye/ is supposed to be but it ain't English. Is that a front-high-unrounded vowel like in French 'tu' or German 'für'? English speakers will just end up saying 'Turkey Yeah!'

English has no rules for how to pronounce letters like ü that are not in its alphabet, and it also has no rules for letter combinations that do not occur in English like consonant plus -iye as the ending.

@tchrist Not quite right: plus ça change, fondue, Dupré, Duquesne… French u → /(j)u:, (j)u/ (often). Also, the combinations "in", "on" and "an" in French have regularly enough transcriptions a nazalized vowels in BrE, and also in AmE I think (vingt-et-un, chanson, grand prix).

@tchrist A cynic might say that English has no rules for how to pronounce letters & letter combinations which are in its alphabet. (I'm looking at you, Loughborough, Leominster & Teignmouth.)

@Barmar I might be guilty of blanket generalization here, but I associate glaring and entrenched mispronunciations of international place names with what I hear on the BBC News, like all the talk of "Sarajevo" in the 90s, rhyming with "are a jay though."

@Barmar This change is because of news exposure but it's a very intentional, political news exposure. Government and then most news media have intentionally switched from a more Russian pronunciation to a more Ukrainian pronunciation.

The linked pronunciation on M-W sounds like it has an extra "t" on the end of the first syllable (turt-key-YAY). Is that an artifact, or is it truly standard?

@LPH but the bird was named after the country.

@WeatherVane It seems that it matters little insofar as what appears to be the true concern of at least some ot the Turkish people are—understandably enough—the associations that can be made, not only with the bird but also, and more importantly with the North American informal use of "turkey" as meaning stupid person.

And what would they make of calling someone a Turk?

@WeatherVane As opposed to a young turk?

@Barmar perhaps it would have been better to rename as Ottoman Republic, a century later, rather than seek to use pronunciation to distance itself from negative stereotypes.

@weathervane indeed, the Turkish for "Turk" is "Türk", and most Englishes don't have the <ü> vowel.

@WeatherVane As long as they didn't complain about the association with furniture.

@AndyBonner how do you pronounce Sarajevo?

@AndyBonner are you saying they were using an affricate for <-je-> instead of a semivowel ("jay" instead of "yay")? I found a video from the war in which Martin Bell seems to pronounce Sarajevo relatively correctly. As I was doing so I encountered a 2006 Oxford/BBC pronunciation guide, which also gives a fairly accurate pronunciation of Sarajevo. Then I thought to look up Mallorca/Majorca, and it says that they stopped recommending the pronunciation with the affricate in 1973, yet that pronunciation still seems to prevail today.

@WeatherVane while we're at it we can rename Austria the Habsburg Republic.

@phoog No, the Austrians can ask the whole world to pronounce them in their native language, "Österreich", to add both "Ö" and "ch" as impossible for English-speakers.

@rexkogitans agreed. My purpose, however, was to call attention to the incongruity of naming a republic after an imperial dynasty. I'm having trouble deciding whether that was also Weather Vane's purpose.

@rexkogitans So they're named like the bird that stereotypically sticks its head in the sand? :) (And I know they don't really do this).