I suppose this sort of thing instantly confuses me - why aren't we already calling the city München if that is what the Germans are doing?
https://www.citymetric.com/horizons/which-european-cities-ha...
One fun fact in there: there's a town in Bulgaria called Plovdiv, but the Italians call it Philipoppoli - and they've been calling it that since long, long before it was called Plovdiv!
Judging by Italian wikipedia, Filippopoli, which makes much more etymological sense.
I wonder what the Italians think of this:
> The city has historically developed on seven syenite hills, some of which are 250 metres (820 feet) high. Because of these hills, Plovdiv is often referred to in Bulgaria as "The City of the Seven Hills".
That topic has so much missed potential. He admits he left off Venice, but what about Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle, a historical town if there ever was one. Most of his examples are just different languages changing spelling to fit their conventions (eg Italian names ending in -o). But it totally overlooks pronunciation (Paris is totally different in French and English). It would be much more interesting to understand why cities sound different in different languages, for example London in English and Londres in French--why did they add they add the r sound to that word?
I heard about Durres, Albania, for the first time today, too.
I had wondered about a connection between door, Germanic \dorz, Latin forum* and port, porta, portal before (Latin f frequently corresponds to English d, e.g. inferior, En under).
Suppose -dres for Londres once meant port, which is always a good guess for any bigger city's name. I can't confirm it though.
Durres derives from Dorian Greek Durrhakhion, but Greek has thura for "door"; so if I'm correct, they would have loaned the form with d. Ironically, Albanian dere "door" has a homophone "bitter; difficult, tiresome" (from a different root if akin to Greek due "misery") and one traditional explanation of Albanias means difficult coast (although there was a historical kingdom Albania far off from the coast).
By the way: It's Londer in Albanian, too, and Londres in many Romance languages.
tl;dr: nobody really knows, and the first address for French etymology doesn't explain Londres either
I recall a story but I'm not sure of its authenticity, it described western traders asking portuguese translators to give them the pronunciation of 日本 (Nihon/Nippon the native word for Japan). The PT translators interpreted the characters through Mandarin and come out with "Jipangu" which would be the root etymology for our english term "Japan".
If Mandarin had been involved, we'd call Japan something like Arben (Riben) in English.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC#Pronunciat...
You mean, what the Deutsche are doing :) Why stop at the city level?
(I just now notice that a sincere implementation of this effort would require adding some diacritics to the German writing system to accomodate the Saxonian dialect.)
The name of the city is derived from the Old/Middle High German term Munichen, meaning "by the monks".
The city state of Monaco is also called Monaco in Italian. Both the English and the Italian names are derived from the Greek word Monoikos, meaning "single house".
The German city of München is called Monaco in Italian and Monacum/Monachium in Latin. The Italian name derives from the Latin name, which in turn is derives from the Latin word for monk.
To avoid confusion, the German city is more commonly referred to as "Monaco di Baviera" (Monaco of Bavaria) to better differentiate it from the microstate.