Fair enough, but I think Munich is an interesting case, and I was disappointed to find on opening the thread that it was not specifically about Munich, but about exonyms in general.
The term “exonym” refers to local names for foreign places, and there is no general answer to the general question of why they exist. The answer in a specific case is often interesting, however.
In the case of “Munich”, we have an English version that looks like a German word, and moreover is not pronounced according to English spelling norms, but more like an English approximation of how it would be pronounced if it were a German word.
The French (from whom we presumably borrowed the word) use the same spelling “Munich” but with French pronunciation.
But that’s a different issue, since the locals changed the names themselves. Same thing applies to lots of places, like Constantinople, Leningrad, and Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania.
The Italians, on the other hand, give Munich a perfectly reasonable sounding name: Monaco. That freaked my brother out when he was trying to find the train from Milan to Munich.
As a follow-up to this, English often doesn’t even spell English place names the way they sound: Norwich, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, and many other places have divergent pronunciations from their spellings.
"The city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukam."
They just call it Krung Thep – City of Angels – for short. “Bangkok” comes from bang kok, or “Place of olive trees.” It may have been the name of an old fishing settlement in the area prior to the capital being moved here after the last sacking of the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya by the Burmese. Only foreigners call it Bangkok, but the Thais all know the name. However, how’d you like to HAVE to call it all that?
I feel honoured that you consider Bavarian a language - but officially, the language of München and of Bavaria is still High German, and Bavarian is a dialect. Linguists are another matter. (But then, their standard answer is “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” that is, the difference between dialect and language is political, not scientific).
So, Minga is a local dialect corruption of the German word München. Which in itself is a corruption of the older original word Munichen = at the monks, which was the description of the little village it started out as.
Frankly, as Münchner Kindl (Munich native - I have never heard the proper English word for somebody who lives in Munich) I am satisfied if your map makers conform to the International scientific standard, that is, writing foreign names in the local official language München and underneath in smaller script, the English name (Munich). Because that’s what proper maps look like here.
It looks like constanze has told us the answer to the original question…why do we call Munchen Munich? If Munchen "…is a corruption of the older original word “Munichen”… then it appears obvious that the English spelling was developed back during the time this older original word was in use. i.e. “Munichen” minus the “en” became “Munich” in English. This would seem to make sense but I’ll defer to those more knowledgeable.
Not only that, but the umlaut-u is hard for English speakers to handle (it’s sort of like the “o” in “boo,” not the “o” in “book,” but kind of stifled). Additionally, the “m” leads directly into the umlaut-u, without the Anglicized “Myoon” in “Myoonick.” English doesn’t have many words that start with “mooh.” (stifled “oo”)
While there is a history of divergent spellings and pronunciation of foreign places compared to their local spelling and pronunciation, modern English (well, at least American English) goes out of its way to get the best spelling and pronunciation of foreign places. Just look at all the different spellings of Al Qaeda to try to get it right. This is mostly the work of our foreign press pronouncing these places for us as soon as they become ‘important’ to us rather than reading about these places and pronouncing the approximate spelling incorrectly.
E.g., I would be pronouncing Qatar as ‘Kah-TAHR’ if it wasn’t for hearing TV talking heads saying “CUH-ter”.
It’s a little simpler than that: “reich” means “country; realm; empire” so in Latin it was just replaced with the -ia suffix usually used for country-names; “oster” and “aust” are the German and Latin roots for “east”.
A few years ago, NBC decided to make all references to the Olympic host city, “Turino”, rather than the standard English, “Turin”. It sounded affected then, and, generally, using the native name or pronunciation when spoken by an English speaker in English to English speakers sounds pretentious.
