Should the Deutsch refer to Griechenland as the Ελληνική Δημοκρατία, or Frankreich as France? Does this mean they can demand the rest of the English world to stop calling München as Munich and Köln as Cologne?
And what do you say to a Kurd who lives in Turkey and says “Tirkiye”? Are they incorrect in your view?
To let outsiders decide what a country should be called, despite the country itself objecting, is beyond weird to me. How would you like it when your colleagues decided to call you by another name, just because they liked it better?
This already happens. It’s called nicknames. Sometimes a name in its original tongue is hard to pronounce for others, so we adopt a simpler one for convenience.
Though I would agree a bully might continue to use a nickname which has been _vetoed_ by it's target.
To my knowledge absolutely no one calls them the "Confoederatio Helvetica" in normal conversation, neither the Swiss themselves nor foreigners. (And ironically that name seems to have its roots in an occupation by the French revolutionary army and a name given by Napoleon Bonaparte)
Also, I don't think you can always assume inhabitants of a country can agree to a common name. Often, names are heavily associated with political issues or power or identity issues and it may be impossible to choose a particular name and staying neutral in the conflict.
Example: Try to ask some people from Northern Ireland whether the name of the city is "Derry" or "Londonderry".
Why should a country have only one name across the whole world regardless of language being spoken? What are countries without Latin languages to do: write “Turkiye” amidst their non-latin script?
And what of the Kurds? Is their spelling now wrong?
Turkiye is how it is spelt in Turkish. Every other language has its own spelling and pronunciation. This happens with all countries.
Exonyms are very much a question for the outsiders. Nothing even remotely weird about it.
> How would you like it when your colleagues decided to call you by another name, just because they liked it better?
But they very often do, so what can you do about that? For example I seriously doubt that any large group outside of China calls Chinese nationals with proper tones, so that's over one billion people being "called by another name" in one fell swoop.
If you ask someone from Switzerland you will probably get 2-3 different words for the different languages they know. Being multilingual is the norm over there.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180325-switzerlands-inv...
[1] https://italiana.esteri.it/italiana/en/language-education/bi...
The convention is to use the simplest common language (english) for such names, not the original, internal names.
And Greece is certainly called Ελλάδα inside, not the "Greek Democracy".
Such requests would not lead far. As you can see that still everybody refuses to write Japanese names (e.g. in sports) in the correct order. It got better with Chinese and Korean names recently, but foreigners are still extremely wrong about Japanese conventions.
And don't get us started about how they treat our foreign names here within Japan
Refuse to write names in correct order? How about refusing to open a bank account for you because they won’t allow YOUR country’s conventions.
I assume you translated the "Ελληνική Δημοκρατία" of the parent comment somehow, but it is not correct. The actual translation is "Hellenic Republic", which is what is written in official documents (for example, on passport covers).
As you correctly point out, the state name (Hellenic Republic) is not always the country name (Hellas).
Venezia is Italian, which is a slightly artificial language pushed by the authorities 150 years ago in order to administer the newly unified country more efficiently. Only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly when the nation was unified in 1861.
The game of "original" is extra tricky in Europe, with its long succession of cultures and empires. Quite a lot of settlements around the Mediterranean would originally be named either in Greek, or in Phoenician.
By Anglicizing those names for your use, you aren't doing anything bad, you're only repeating a process that has taken place many times before.