Talk:Exonym and endonym

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Almost all nativ tribes and people of America have exonyms, off the top of my head: inca, ahh...--145.94.41.95 22:02, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

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[edit] Iran?

Seems like Iran should be added to the list of examples wherein a country requests not to be refered to by use of an exonym, since it is one of the best known examples of this. Is there a particular reason it isn't included? I'd add it myself, but I don't know the date and circumstances, and have run out of time to research.

[edit] UN conference on the standardization of geographical names

Recently included content relating to the conference has been cut entirely (and not transferred to the UN conference article as indicated in my edit summary), with the invitation to tidy it up and include in that article. RealityCheck 11:34, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Better intro

I'd like to replace the current intro with the following. I'll go ahead and make the change if no objection is lodged:

An exonym is a name for a place or people that is different from the name used in the native language. For example, London is known as Londres in Spanish, French and Portuguese; Londra in Italian and Londýn in Czech and Slovak and Londyn in Polish. The opposite of an exonym is an endonym. Roma is an endonym, while Rome is an exonym.

The use of exonyms is often controversial. Groups often prefer that outsiders avoid exonyms; for example, Roma people prefer that term over exonyms like Gypsy. People may also seek to avoid exonyms due to historical sensitivities, as in the case of German language German names for Polish and Czech places.

In recent years, geographers have sought to reduce the use of exonyms to avoid these kind of problems. For example, it is now common for Latin Americans to refer to the Turkish capital as Ankara rather than use the Spanish exonym Angora.

But according to the United Nations Statistics Division:

Time has, however, shown that initial ambitious attempts to rapidly decrease the number of exonyms were over-optimistic and not possible to realise in the intended way. The reason would appear to be that many exonyms have become common words in a language and can be seen as part of the language’s cultural heritage.

(External links section:)

Mwalcoff, this would be a good improvement. I think a revised version should maintain the point somewhere that an exonym is one which has been assigned by outsiders; the London example is helpful and could more explicitly state something along the lines of "exonyms for London include..."; and in outlining the controversy I think we need to retain the point that whether a term is considered to be an exonym can depend on how widely the concept is defined. RealityCheck 03:05, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Thank you. Do you have an example of the word "exonym" being used with the narrower definition? Thanks -- Mwalcoff 23:39, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
I've added a non-cognate example in the intro as these tend to give most controversy. Also renamed the page. Joestynes 10:49, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] An exonym becoming an endonym

The article should talk about this, too. For example, the Megleno-Romanians no longer use a word derived from "romanus", but use "vlaşi", derived from Vlach, which was originally an exonym. bogdan 11:30, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Post colonial India

Post colonial India is interesting in that recently Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, etc. (all major international airports) have dropped their exonyms in favour of endonyms. Some Indians have felt that this is part of an over-arching pro-Hindi political program - a component of the predominantly Hindi speaking (North-West Indian) power-holders who are working legislatively to drop English as the national language of India in favour of Hindi.

Of course, other exonyms used by the tea trade have also fallen into disuse (Formosa, Ceylon etc.) (20040302)

[edit] Revert explanation

I have reverted the changes made by the user at 128.176.76.xxx (two separate endings; probably the same user). I did replace what he/she wrote about pronunciations but put it in better English. I removed the word "now" (I assume the user meant "current") before "Polish and Czech." All of today's Czech and Polish republics were occupied by the Germans during WWII, so the sentence about German exonyms applies to all Czech and Polish place names. (I'm not going to begin to get into the situation of formerly Polish places now in former Soviet republics.) -- Mwalcoff 00:30, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I think you're missing the point. When it comes to German names of Polish and Czech place names, you have to distinguish traditional exonyms that were in use before WWII (because of an autochthonous German population and/or because they name places that had belonged to Germany e.g. in East Prussia and Silesia) and wartime-only German place names such as Litzmannstadt for Lodz. Nobody in Germany today (except hardcore Neonazis) will ever think of using wartime-only German place names. Traditional German place names however are commonly used and ever fewer people use the endonyms. Before the end of communism some people took exception to this because in theory the border question was not yet settled for good and they wanted to underline the fact that Breslau/Wroclaw, which was German until the war, was now Polish. So the problem is not that of occupation but that of annexation (in other words: all Poland was occupied, but only parts of present-day Poland were German before the war(s)).
As for your rephrasing, it may be better English but it is not as accurate. It does not contain the information that the English pronunciation of Paris is not the nearest approximation of the French (which would simply exchange the French r for an English one). It is exactly this (not being the nearest approximation) and not the mere fact that the pronunciation is phonetically different which makes it an exonym.
Some languages use the same spelling of an exonym but change the pronunciation.
I have my doubts whether you have understood the concept of exonymy. Before the change of spelling and/or pronunciation it is called an endonym, only after that is is an exonym. --89.52.126.194 20:57, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, that was a typo by me. I think everything is OK now. I just made a minor change to the language in the Paris part. -- Mwalcoff 00:35, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Maghreb, Morocco

Does not "Maghreb" (and related words and spellings) refer to the whole Mediterranean-Coastal region of North-west Africa? Including Tunisia and colastal Algeria? So does not the use of the word by Morrocons refer to a trans-national identity at least as much as it does to the country that in English is known as "Morocco?" Dvd Avins 21:09, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

The litteral meaning of Arabic "Maghrib" is "West", and Morocco is the farthest west Arab state... AnonMoos 17:27, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cymry?

Changed Cymry to correct spelling, Cymru, which of course does not mean 'Welsh,' but Wales.

        Those are two different words and both are correct.212.76.37.191 22:29, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Using of the exonym and endonym words

I absolutely support using the exonyma in the national languages, because it is a part of our language and culture. But very often it is necessary to use both the exonym and endonym, because many people have troubles with the pronounciation or knowledge of some names. In my opinion it would be nonsense to say in English: I visited Praha. Normally you would say: I visited Prague but you should know that the endonym of Prague is Praha. The same example in the Czech language: You never say: Navštívil jsem London (I visited London) but Navštívil jsem Londýn.

[edit] Titles of lists

58.179.72.140 changed "exonyms" to "endonyms" for the titles of a couple lists. This change looks wrong for the one that now says "List of English endonyms for peoples" because the English is the exonym. Otherwise, I would agree that the title should say these are endonyms because it really is a lookup for speakers of English that would perhaps only know the exonym already. Maybe just removing "English" makes more sense for that one table. Skapare 04:16, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Exonym? or subtle difference?

Does it really rise to being a case of true exonym, at least for inclusion in a table or list, if the root form is obviously the same and there is only a minor spelling variance to fit the rules of another language? While "Germany" is a true exonym, is "Navarre" (same basic root form over a few languages)? Skapare 04:33, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

I thought the same as well. Many of the country names ending in -ia (and -ie in French) differ from their original name, it seems to be stretching the definition to call all of them exonyms. I think this shows how inadequate the term exonym. But then there's nothing we can do about it. Uly 03:23, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Changing names of lists, a proposal

Some of the exonym lists are not properly so-called, I think. Definitionally: if a region's population shifts, do the former population's toponyms become exonyms? Think Roman Empire, Kaliningrad Oblast, etc. If a region is inhabited by one population but forms part of a state dominated by another, are the local's toponyms endonyms and the "official" ones imposed by the state's majority exonyms, or vice versa, or something else? Think Brittany, South Tirol, Catalonia, Kosovo, etc. If a region is inhabited by multiple populations, whose is the endonym and whose the exonym? Think Transylvania, portions of Moldova, Lithuania, Ukraine, even Los Angeles vs. Los Ángeles. And how do we know which population is the majority.

Given that I believe some of the lists of exonyms are not truly so, it may be better to rename the lot to XXXian names of places in YYY, leaving the endo- vs. exo- debate to the articles themselves: pretty clear that English names of places in Lithuania, say, are exonyms, but less clear that German or Polish names of places in Lithuania is so, and the status of Russian or Belarussian names of places in Lithuania is murkier still, as is the status of Samogitian names of places in Lithuania.

Any thoughts about name changing the lists?

Carlossuarez46 20:05, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wales

Surely the endonyms Cymru (Wales), Cymro (Welshman), Cymry (Welsh people, the Welsh) all derivez from cwm "valley" NOT "comrade". needs changing —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.78.78.41 (talk) 18:48, 10 December 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Merge from Ethnonym

I'm not sure if this is even a real word (see Talk:Ethnonym), but if it is, it refers to exactly the same thing as this article. Merge - Jack (talk) 10:36, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

oppose ethnonym is a word (Talk:Ethnonym was questioning endonym, not ethnonym). Ethnonym is the same as demonym and should merge there instead. The exonym-endonym distinction is a subissue deserving its separate page. jnestorius(talk) 12:22, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Non-English words

Would it be possible to have the non-English words in some of these lists at least transliterated to English? I mean, it's great that the endonym of Russians is "Русские" but since I can't read Cyrillic characters, I have absolutely no idea how to pronounce this. It's bad enough when I don't know the pronounciation rules of languages that use Latin characters (i.e., Dutch)--with other languages I'm totally lost (and I doubt I'm the only one). :) RobertM525 09:43, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

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