A test case for cmene/fu'ivla creation, or how seriously do we take our phonology rules?
The native word is Türkiye, where ü represents a front rounded vowel, as in German. Turkiye would be morphologically impossible in a native Turkish word, because native words have to have either front vowels or back vowels, not both.
Now officially Lojban vowels are independent of rounding. (People usually round o and u because their native languages do, and I round y as well to help distinguish it from sloppy a.) Therefore, the Lojban counterpart of ü should be its unrounded version i, leading to a protoform ''tirki,ie" or the like.
Nevertheless, this is strongly resisted. People, perhaps influenced by the spelling or by the English form, think of the first vowel as a u, and the resultant protoform is turki,ie or something like it. Nick Nicholas has weighed in on the side of u (but of course he is a Greek ).
- And Nick now believes John is right, and has used tirkie in his latest Lojban prose (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/9782) — nitcion
See also (irrelevantly) terki.