Nitpick: “Cologne” is not an anglicisation; it’s French.
One of the features of English is that it quite often adopts, as the English name of a city in country A, the name of that city in the language of country B. Thus the Italian city of Firenze is called, in English, by its French name, Florence. Same goes for Roma, Milano, Venezia and several other places. The Austrian city of Wien, by contrast, is called by its Italian name, Vienna. München is referred to by its French name, Munich. For Berne, a German-speaking city in Switzerland, the English use the French name (Berne); for Genève, a French-speaking city, they use the Italian name (Geneva). And so forth.
Monaco, the country, consists of one municipality, also called Monaco. The municipality, in turn, is divided into a number of wards, one of which is Monte-Carlo. There are currently 11 (I think) wards, but at one time there were only three, of which Monte-Carlo was much the most signficant, and Monte-Carlo was sometimes used to refer to the entire country.
Monaco, in Italian, is also the name of the German city that English- and French-speakers call Munich, and it’s possible that this contributed to the use of Monte-Carlo to refer to the entire principality.
Many cities in Eastern Europe have changed names as they changed nationality. Lviv, in western Ukraine, has in the last hundred years also been called L’vov, Lwow, and Lemberg.
People from Cologne/Köln call it Kölle (it’s a sort of nickname).
Barmen and Elberfeld merged about 90 years ago and now they are called Wuppertal (a completely new name, like when two companies merge). However there are still people who were born in Elberfeld or Barmen.
In 1990, Karl-Marx-Stadt was renamed (back) Chemnitz.
Finally, a funny airline has been renaming tiny villages close to its main airports to promote them as tourist destinations: the town of Stansted is now known by “Continental” Europeans as “London”, while Hahn, inhabited by 178 people, has become “Frankfurt”.
Nitpick: the Italian name of Geneva is “Ginevra” (which is btw the same as the Italian translation of Guinevere, so Italians tend to think that Lancelot was in love with a Swiss lady).
In my view, one of the oddest anglicisations of Continental place-names, is the English version – Leghorn – of the Italian port of Livorno. For all I know, via some intermediate language; and suggestions by some, taken on board, that it may have to do with the city in question being (sorta-kinda) on the Ligurian Sea (hence the g): still seems rather bonkers, to me.
A thing I’ve always liked re European-continental-name-swopping-and-switching: in France, there are two towns – on the river Rhone south of Lyon, less than 100 kilometres apart – called Vienne, and Valence. Also the French names of the cities, respectively, of Wien / Vienna in Austria, and Valencia in Spain. Ah, well – as whatsisface memorably wrote – “What’s in a name?”
If I recall correctly, “Cologne” and “Munich” come to English from French. “Vienna” comes to English from Italian.
Both “Cologne” and “Köln” derive from “Colonia Agrippina.”
“Munich” and “München” both derive from “ad Munichen.”
“Wien” and “Vienna” both derive from “Vindobona.”
So in none of these cases was the German name merely Anglicized. And in at least two cases, the name is independently derived from the original Latin name.
There’s a somewhat similar phenomenon in the Cleveland, Ohio area - suburb names with two words are often reduced to one. Shaker Heights becomes “Shaker”, Rocky River becomes “Rocky”, Pepper Pike becomes “Pepper”, and so on.
This seems more common with wealthy suburbs than those that are more middle class, as if it’s a way to signal you’re part of an in-crowd of sorts. Nobody says they live in “Middleburg” instead of Middleburg Heights, or “Seven” instead of Seven Hills.
Unrelated: Cleveland has what I think are some of the most bucolic and/or sonorous suburb names in the Anglosphere New World, with Johannesburg a close second.
Well, not every day usage, but when a Jewish divorce document is written in Istanbul, the city is still referred to as Constantinople in that document. Under Jewish law, a divorce document must refer to the place where the divorce took place as the same name as all previous divorce documents in that community.
It was done to prevent the divorce document from being challenged by someone claiming that such a town doesn’t exist because the name was changed. By taking legal precedent set by the first document, there’s no question where the divorce took place.
Thais often abbreviate by taking final syllables rather than initial syllables. Thus Nakhon Sawan has the nickname Khon-Wan. (An English-language tour guide refers to it as Nakhon Nowhere. :smack: )