I ran out of room in my title, the rest of the question is: For places that do not have a place name in whatever language is being used.
This is inspired by the recently revived thread about the pronunciation of Niger.
As an example of what I am trying to get at: A world map produced in Russia or China most likely uses as many Russian or Chinese place names as they can which may or may not be the place name used in the local language. I am also guessing that both of these languages have relatively fewer place names in their respective vocabularies than English has in English. I’m supposing it’s that whole: “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” thing that has resulted in so many places having both an English place name as well as a place name in the local language.
That or I am just Anglo-centric.
I am also guessing that Russian or Chinese sources use the local language place name as the basis for transliteration rather then the English place name.
I am not really interested in how these place names are pronounced either in the local language or in the language used in the place where the map is made. I wouldn’t understand those and could not pronounce the place name in it’s local language in any case.
As you will note, this is entirely guess work on my behalf.
There won’t be a single answer to this because each country/language is going to have it’s own solutions. You say “so many places having both an English place name as well as a place name in the local language”, but a large number of English place names are the place name kinda-sorta in the local language, just mangled a bit in translation to English. You mentioned China and Russia–Beijing and Moscow are just slightly mangled attempts of the local names. Many if not most other countries likely do more or less the same–using the name the natives have for it, only mangled to fit into the phonemes used in their language.
The same convention english speakers use for places that don’t have names in english: you use whatever sounds (in your native language) best match the foreign name. Alternatively you’d use “land of the (people name)” since most languages will have developed names for the different flavors of foreigner they’ve encountered.
Most of the -stan country names translate as ‘place of the …’
Well, a lot of places don’t have English place names, and English therefore uses the French name, or something anglicised from the French name - for example Rome, Florence, Venice, Vienna and - until supplanted by Beijing - Peking. Bombay, now replaced by Mumbai, is from Portuguese. And Jerusalem is of course from a Latinisation of a Hellenisation of the Hebrew name.
And herein lies a clue to at least a partial answer to the larger raised in the OP. What name do the people of a particular culture give to a city in a far-off place? The answer depends, or partly depends, on how they know about the city concerned, who they hear about it from, who they talk to about it, etc.
Which suggestgs that, with the global dominance of English, it’s quite possible that place-names developed today by other cultures will be based on, or influenced by, the place-names already current in English.
Darren Garrison, now that you kindly pointed it out, I see that the question is entirely too big and too general to get more of an answer than you and dstarfire have given.
I wounder what to do, I guess I could focus the question on just one language. If I do that, French would be my choice, because the French also had a World wide Empire and the French and English have been mutually antagonistic for a long time.
Okay, dopers that have followed thus far; to sharpen this question, I request that we restrict ourselves to one language and I request that language be French.
The question has already been answered for French. And Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Japanese…
if you were trying to find out how do people choose placenames when naming a location for the first time, that does vary from culture to culture (not even language to language) more than what happens when encountering a place that’s already got a name. For example, I was in Middle Tennessee a couple of weeks ago and it struck me how many places were called “Whomeverville”: you don’t find that structure in Spanish (we have places called “Villasomething” or “Ciudad Something” after a concept, not a person), but you also don’t see it in England.
Well, in France and in many European countries, city names are often derived from names created by the Romans and Greeks thousands of years ago.
“Castrum” is the Latin word for “army camp.” So any English town whose name ends in " caster" or “chester” was built in what was once a Roman army settlement.
“Polis” was the Greek word for city, so “Napoli” (Naples) and “Tripoli” and “Indianapolis” all have Greek suffixes.
In India, many European, Asian and Middle eastern Places are still referred by names pre English occupation. For example :
China = Cheen
Greece = Yunan
Egypt = Mishr
Russia = Roose
2,000-year-old Hebrew names: “Hodu” for India, “Sin” for China, “Mitzrayim” for Egypt, “Yavan” for Greece and so on. Some of them were recycled from other places: “Tzarfat”, for instance, once referred to a site in Lebanon, but is now Hebrew for France.
“Latinate” names: Italia, Germania, Anglia, Shvedia (Sweden), Russia (pronounced "Roo-see-yaa) and so on.
Transcription of their official names, either in their own language, or in English (with adjustments - as Hebrew has no J, for instance, Japan is called “Yapan”).
Exonyms of place names can offer interesting glimpses into a language’s history. For instance: the Hungarian name for Russia(n) is Orosz. How’d that extra O get stuck on the front? Because, around the time when Árpád and the Magyars moved west to the Danubian plain of Pannonia, in Old Hungarian there was a phonological rule that /r/ could not occur word-initially. Prior to moving west, the Magyars had been part of a Turkic tribal confederation on the steppes, which is how so many old Turkic words got into Hungarian. Turkic languages too had the rule of no word-initial /r/. To make pronunciation of foreign names starting with R- easier, they prefixed a vowel to ease into the sound. Called a prothetic vowel. Like the E- in España. Contemporaneous with Árpád and the founding of the Magyar state, the Kievan Rus state was also just getting started (they passed it on the way into Pannonia). In modern Hungarian, they use tons of words starting with r- now that they’ve gotten used to pronouncing it. But sometimes the old form has stuck.
Many European cities are very old, and have gone through several conquests… after which, the city was sort-of renamed in the language of the new inhabitants.
The Phoenicians founded a city in what’s now France. They called it Massala. The name was eventually Romanized and then Frenchified, to where it’s now Marseille.
The German city of Koln/Cologne used to have a long Latin name beginning with the word Colonia (Colony). The rest of the name disappeared, and the city is now just called, in effect, “Colony.”
The modern Sicilian town of Siragusa is the same city the ancient Athenians called Syracuse.
Many Irish and Scottish towns were named for the local churches.
The Irish word for Church is “Cille” (pronounced like “kill”). The Scottish word for church is “Kirk.”
So, if an Irish town is called “Killarney” or “Kildare” or “Kilkenny,” it was named for a nearby church. And so was any Scottish town that ends with “kirk.”
Now, in Dutch, “kill” means “creek” or “stream.” So, if you come upon a town in upstate New York that ends with “kill,” it was named after a nearby stream.
One interesting observation is that “United States” is not a name but a description. At least in the two languages I am somewhat familiar with, it is just translated: “Vereinigten Staaten” and “Etas Unis” and I think I have seen similar appellations in other languages.
Note also that our name for Germany is not related to either the German name (Deutschland, or land of the Teutons) or the French name (Allemagne, for one of the tribes that made up Germany). Ours is from the Latin name for part of the area.
AFAIK, Canada stays pretty much the same in all languages. I think there was a recent thread on the subject.
Nitpick: Bombay is from the name used by the Portuguese. We don’t know if the name actually derives from Portuguese; it has been theorized that the Portuguese name Bombaim comes from the Portuguese bom baim, but there is about the same amount of evidence suggesting Bombaim was a corruption of a local name.
Hindustan is a Persian loanword, not an English-origin name.
This is very interesting. I’ve always wondered why that was since, as you note at the end, initial-Rs are common in modern Hungarian. Cool.
Germany is an interesting one, as it seems to have quite the varied set of names for itself, depending on the language. Other than the German names, the French names, and the Latin names mentioned, there’s also the Slavic names, which are variants of proto-Slavic nemcy (or similar), meaning something like “mute” or “foreigner” or “one who doesn’t speak our language.” Then there’s the variants naming it after the Saxon tribe, like Finnish saksamaa. And then the Baltic languages have their own series of exonyms that generally follow the pattern of an initial “v” with a /k/ or /ts/ as the next consonant over. There doesn’t seem to be an established etymology for that one, though.
Here is a list of a few Japanese country names. Most of those are obviously pretty much the English version mutilated to fit into kana. Here are Japanese names for US states. No English pronunciation given, but you can get a rough idea by plugging the kana into this text-to-speech site. The pronunciations seem pretty close, even given the mechanical nature of the voice