> That said, I don't know how bad ü -> u is in Turkish. At least in German, doing so often changes the meaning, and äöü have to be transliterated as ae, oe, ue

> That said, I don't know how bad ü -> u is in Turkish. At least in German, doing so often changes the meaning, and äöü have to be transliterated as ae, oe, ue instead. (Obviously a ton of software does something bad like "decompose Unicode characters and filter out non-ASCII letters" and gets it wrong, also hilariously failing the test.) Ü and Ö have almost the same sounds as German in Turkish. When they constructed the Latin-based script for Turkish, they looked at the European languages and their ways of writing. So no surprises there. Writing ü as u change meaning a lot. "Kul" means a servant; while "kül" is ash. However Turkish lacks the concept of digraphs. Having two vowels next to each other is extremely rare. If two vowels like oe are put together, a native reader will read them as o e (oh eh) and then maybe blend them a little. So when technology got introduced, we didn't know what to do with ASCII-only systems that Americans sold to us. People started to write ü,ö,ı,ş,ç,ğ as u,o,i,s,c,g. It causes names of the people to be mispronounced in (usually English speaking) media and in international environments. Many young people started to use SMS with those conversions in 90s. So we are stuck.