What do Japan, Germany and Italy have in common? No, I'm not talking about World War II. I'm talking about the fact that their English names aren't the names they refer to themselves by--they're exonyms (I didn't even know there was a word for it till now!) Japan in Japanese is Nihon or Nippon, Germany in German is Deutschland, and Italy in Italian is Italia (not so far off, but a little different). Same story with China, Korea, Spain, and who knows how many other countries. Why is it that we call them by different names than they call themselves?

The name Japan apparently comes from a Portuguese attempt at a Chinese name for the country. Germany comes the Latin name...the origin of which is unknown.

Should we stop using exonyms and start using the names that locals use for their countries? Some efforts have been made toward that end (see the Wikipedia article on exonyms for some details and related links), but in fact, it's not entirely possible. For one thing, not everyone in some countries uses the same name for their country--China being the first example to come to mind. Each language or dialect probably has its own pronunciation. And speaking of pronunciations, the average English speaker probably couldn't pronounce the Chinese name for China correctly if they tried. We might hit the vowels reasonably close, but the odds of us getting the tones right too are pretty slim.

But maybe we should at least try a little harder.