Thank you all, such a wonderful variety of answers.
Some of these I had read or heard about, a great many were new to me.
I am not at all qualified to comment on any of them but I consider my ignorance to have been fought.
Side remark: Dick Cheney was not wrong when he said [Paraphrase] We don’t know what we don’t know. I have some vague ideas of what I don’t know. I also believe there is just a great deal of things that could be known that I don’t even have a inkling about. Sometimes, I think that as my horizon of knowledge increases, it just expands the amount of things that could be known by me but aren’t.
One I wonder about: If a Chinese newspaper had some reason to report on something in Cleveland, or Chicago, they’d obviously have to use some set of characters that phonetically approximates those names, because obviously Cleveland and Chicago don’t have native Chinese names. But what if something noteworthy happened in a city named after a Chinese city (say, Canton, OH)? Would they also phonetically approximate that, or would they use the same character as for Canton, China?
And what if it’s, say, New York? They won’t have their own word for “York”, but there is a Chinese word for “New”. Would they use that Chinese word, or would they find some character with a sound like “Noo”?
Or, getting back to those towns for which there’s no option but the phonetic one: The Chinese languages have a lot of homophones. Is there some standardized choice of name that all Chinese style guides would use for foreign cities? How obscure does a city have to be before it’s not in such style guides?
In German the names for many Central and European cities are completely different from the name in the national language, a legacy of the long and extensive German cultural presence in these regions. Some examples are Pressburg (Bratislava), Revel (Tallinn), Lemberg (Lviv). My limited understanding is that these names are being slowly replaced with more “accurate” names.
Bratislava and Pressburg are both derived ultimately from Braslav, the supposed founder of the settlement. In a sense, therefore, they are not different names for the same city, but the same name in different langauges, much like Gaelic Dùn Èideann and Scots Edinburgh.
OK, well, then there’s Pozsony for Bratislava in Hungarian. But there are a bunch of Hungarian names for various parts of the former Austro-Hungarian empire.
It’s phonetic, 坎頓, as opposed to the Chinese city 廣州, but that’s predictable because ‘Canton’ for the Chinese city is from a Portuguese version of a dialectical pronunciation v. Guangzhou which mimics the Mandarin pronunciation.
Also phonetic.
I don’t know how small, but yes standard for cities of any size.
As mentioned in previous discussions on this general topic, Chinese also also has its own pronunciations for proper names in nearby countries long in the ‘Sinosphere’ which don’t match the local pronunciations in those countries. Korean cities for example. Almost all Korean place names (people’s names also) are Chinese derived, can be written in Chinese characters with a particular meaning. But the characters typically have a different pronunciation in Korean than in Chinese. The Chinese typically write the characters used in Korean, not characters chosen to match the Korean pronunciation. The major exception is Seoul, virtually the only Korean place name without a Chinese character equivalent. Up to recently the Chinese translated ‘Seoul’ as 漢城, Hànchéng, pronounced Hanseong in Korean, a different name for the city from the Joseon era (‘Seoul’ was adopted after the end of Japanese rule in 1945). The modern Chinese style guide says to use the characters 首爾 which sound like Shǒu’ěr, in response to Korean annoyance, but Google Translate still comes back with Hànchéng for Seoul. Also on Chinese language internet pages it’s not unusual to see the Korean pronunciation of a Korean proper name parenthetically written in the Korean alphabet, under the assumption educated Chinese people interested in Korea might know it.
In the other direction it used to be common for Korean media to write just the Chinese characters of Chinese place and people’s names, the reader would apply the Korean pronunciation. Now it’s standard to write the names in the Korean alphabet trying to match the Chinese pronunciation, sometimes with the Chinese characters in parentheses.
A broadly similar issue exists between/among Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.
Just to add to the weirdness around Germany exonyms, while Italian names the country Germania, after Latin, similar to English, the Italian for German is tedesco. That is of course the Italianized version of ancient Germanic þiudiskaz, Old English þēodisc, Modern High German deutsch, and “Dutch.”
What, no mention of a place name like “Chicago” which is (believe to be) a version of the native name that was first rendered in something like French (hence the initial “ch” being pronounced as in French rather than in English) which then was brought into English.
The US landscape is littered with place-names that started in various Native languages filtered through various European languages (chiefly French and Spanish, but some others as well) then wandering into English. Because there are large areas of the US that were not originally English speaking either when owed by the Natives (of course) or seized by the colonials.
North America was settled recently enough that the names of the towns have not been eroded by centuries of use as they have been in Europe, so there are relatively few mysteries about how they actually got their names. And the majority of American towns and villages are named after people (the -ville, by the way, was borrowed from the French word for “city”). I suspect if we could find the actual origin of European names (what origins we have for most European place names are basically educated guesses), they would also mostly be named after people.
Recently, I realized the Montreal, Konigsburg and Monterey all translate to “king’s mountain”.
But the real winner in that contest would be various "New Town"s. Newton, Villanova, and Neustadt would be just the beginning. I doubt if there’s a significantly-sized linguistic community that doesn’t have a town named that in their own language.
Nava, in a different thread, you mentioned something about having a list of all the American places named for Spanish provincial capitals. Were you aware of Vittoria, Ontario, which is named for Vitoria-Gasteiz? OK, an indirect naming, since it was actually named for a battle in the Peninsular Campaign, but the battle was named for the city it was near.
Similarly, in Japan a foreign name that is derived from Japanese is still treated as a foreign name. They refer to Little Tokyo (Japanese neighborhood in LA) as リトルトーキョー (phonetic representation of “little tokyo”) not 小東京 (Japanese word for small and Tokyo). And when Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize this year, Japanese newspapers reported his name as カズオ・イシグロ (phonetic, with first name first) even though he was actually born in Japan and had a Japanese name: 石黒 一雄.