supplementing the Royal Navy with an Imperial Navy, which would itself include an Indian Navy. The Dominions and the Indian government were unimpressed: they wanted neither the costs nor the responsibility.
In this context, reach for your bedside copy of Cole's "Imperial Military Geography" (the 1937 edition) which IIRC remarks on just how low, as a proportion of GDP, peacetime military spending was in the Dominions compared to the UK itself.
Western opinion now concluded that by revoking Russian privileges, the Chinese were influenced by the Russian government and getting too close to the Communists (No, I don't understand this either, can somebody please explain.)
I don't know the history any better than you, but my surmise is that they ascribed more agency to Russia than to China, so interpreted the same set of facts as "the Soviets are treating the Chinese super-leniently, giving up stuff they don't have to, threatening the legitimacy of our unequal treaties, they much all be in bed together in some nefarious way".
The status of the Chinese state remained unresolved until the resumption of Japanese aggression in the early 1930s the present day. FTFY. Other things with China were were foreign control of revenues, mostly customs, demanded as security for loans, mostly contracted to pay China's indemnity to Japan after the 1895 war. Also, American banking/railway consortia had been trying for years to elbow in on the Manchurian railways.
Washington Conference, by weakening Anglo-American naval power, set up the conditions for the Japanese and Italian aggression of the 1930s
The other way to cut this is that the Japanese accepted a permanent handicap, and constructing capital ships takes so long that by the time the Washington system collapsed the Americans had an unassailable lead. (Which of course would have happened anyway, given their relative economic strength. That 7:10 ratio didn't at all reflect Japan's actual resources, and wouldn't even today.)
Chris Y again! I'm impressed by the overachievers doing good work on this!
I'm a few pages shy of caught up, but I really liked the way this section showed the interconnection of war and economic concerns and the way the rhetoric that gets used obscures in both directions.
Second 5. The most interesting thing I learned here is I think that Japan had a strong domestic constituency for disarmament and imperial retrenchment.
||Also, no dickishness intended, whither, chapter 22?|>
This is totally off-topic, but I just read this piece on what the Turkish coup felt like in Istanbul and it mentions (if I'm reading correctly) a shepherd who happens to be in town talking about the feeling of connectedness to WWI and what it inspired. As an American, even a pacifist one who gets sappy about fields of poppies and the like, that's not really on my emotional or metaphorical radar, and this book has helped me see how much does still resonate.
I guess not totally off-topic. But close!
2: That was the way I read it as well--both parts.
The conference as a whole seems to have gone very well; extensive prep work and specifics really seem to have impressed everyone. (Well, that and making a proposal that just happened to coincide with everyone's internal politics.)
I apologise that this only addresses one chapter; I'll try and get the other one done in the course of the week, but too much shit is happening in the real world.
3. Yes. Sorry for dealing with that in a short subordinate clause which on review wasn't very clear, but the thing was getting too long anyway.
... just how low, as a proportion of GDP, peacetime military spending was in the Dominions compared to the UK itself.
Colonies hate chipping in for their own defense. Look at America in the 1760s.
"The spirit of Çanakkale is alive here today," said Yücel, referring to the pivotal World War I battle that paved the way for Turkish independence.
That is certainly one interpretation of history. (Independence from whom, exactly?)
Oh God my chapter is coming up and I still haven't started the re-reading. Get ready for some crap!
Nice summary on this one btw. Do a worse or more embarassing job please!
I mean, does this guy - who apparently lives in Turkey and speaks Turkish - seriously think that WW1 Turkey was a colonised nation? Whose colony does he think it was?
Also, does he think that Turkey was on the winning side?
13: Written by (I believe) a UK expat living in Turkey. (The site and related awesome-looking tours were started by a childhood friend's husband. They were on the last flight out of the airport before the coup and are now living in Portugal.) It's not how I'd have phrased it, but that this is the message being presented to someone I assume doesn't pass as Turkish seemed interesting.
15: I think by "independence" he means "no longer being an empire," which is the opposite of how people normally look at it but not out of line with how some of my secular Turkish friends would describe the change.
I dunno, it seems pretty reasonable that if the Brits and their sheep loving antipodean cousins had won Gallipoli and shattered the Turkish army all of Western Turkey would have been severed and given to the Greeks (since that was in fact what Lloyd George tried to do after 1918) and that the rest would be under some kind of Anglo-French European mandate rule (since that's in fact what happened to the rest of the Ottoman Empire).
11: No apology necessary, on either count! Something Tooze says elsewhere is how strong the legacy of WWI is in East Asia. Which I still don't know enough to evaluate properly, but it's interesting.
Huh, Thorn's childhood friend married my wife's college buddy. Apparently. (The culinary backstreets Istanbul tour that we went on was pretty awesome.)
17: Free of the Turkic man's burden! If only other empires had such a healthy attitude!
20: That's funny! I haven't met An/s/e/l but his wife and I were at the Canadian beach where my grandparents rented a cottage for together every summer for a week or two (for me, all summer for her as a local) as children, and facebook reconnecting has been particularly cool in that context. (It turns out one other of my beach friends also has a life that overlaps with mine in weird ways.)
Sort of on topic, I ran into some bronze friezes outside one of Chiang's residences today and OMG what a goddamn fascist. No photos because dead phone and no googlejoy.
I ran into some bronze friezes
Ouch
Indeed. They had bayonets and anti-aircraft artillery.
Possibly more Stalinist than fascist, actually, but I don't see there's a material difference there.
If I had a frivolous criticism of Tooze' book so far it's that he seems to be totally inconsistent in his Chinese transliteration, mixing up Wade-Giles and Pinyin apparently at random. Can anybody throw any light?
32: When that happens it's usually because a Wade-Giles transcription has strong familiarity to Westerners, eg. Chiang Kai-shek, not Jiang Jieshi. ISTR Tooze mentions it in a foreword or somewhere.
I'm going to blank on this now that it's coming up, but there are other words (this one was Arabic) where he's inconsistent too. I blame the editor.
In fairness, I don't think Arabic has any accepted standard transcription like pinyin. Barry?
18
Not just if "the allies had won at Gallipolli." I don't recall if this is from Tooze or Macmillan, but after the war the allies occupied Istanbul for quite some time and basically ran everything. Ataturk withdrew from there and established his base inland at Ankara. (There was also a treaty that the Russians would get the straits, which the allies decided was null and void because of the Bolsheviks taking power. Not to mention the Greek invasion, proposals to give Armenia over to a US mandate and SE Turkey to an Italian or French one.)
What the Turks got by winning at Gallipolli was Ataturk, and a Turkish nationalism.
There are various standards but AFAIK (and I'm not Barry-level at all!) not so clearly standardized. I just meant you shouldn't be swapping transliterations from chapter to chapter and he was.
36, 38 It's a mess and most of the Romanization schemes are pretty specialist. I use and prefer ALA-LC myself but it relies on using special diacritics such as macrons (a bit unusual but not that a big a deal) and dots under various consonants (highly unusual as not used anywhere else but for Romanizing Arabic and Arabic script languages).
Caliph is a perfectly good English word at this point and has been for many years but Khalif is terrible, the actual Arabic would be closer to Khalifa and the "i" is long (would have a macron over it in ALA-LC and various other Romanization schemes).
I'm afraid there is no easy way to render it along the lines of Wade-Giles or pinyin. I'm curious as to what dagger aleph would say and what she uses professionally.
I apologise that this only addresses one chapter; I'll try and get the other one done in the course of the week, but too much shit is happening in the real world.
I personally could really use another week, as I've just started a new job and am getting my feet under me. (And also, suddenly have zero time for any reading.) But, am going to be doing my best to catch up and be perfectly ready.
33 was what I first assumed when I noticed the different romanizations but then I saw names nobody would recognize in Wade-Giles. I think Tooze might have just been lazy in some cases.
"Tooze" rhymes with "snooze". Unless it doesn't. I have no idea how the man says his name.
40
"Khalifa" sounds like "Kaleesi," which everyone understands, amirite?
Sort of on-topic for this thread, I'm currently reading The Inheritance of Rome (which actually might be a good choice for the reading group, although it would admittedly be another white male author) and Wickham's Arabic romanizations are also weirdly inconsistent. For one thing, he consistently uses the spelling "vizir" rather than "vizier," which might be a British/American difference I guess, but is weird in context because however you spell it the English word is a borrowing from Ottoman Turkish, where it is in turn a borrowing from Arabic wazir, which would be more appropriate for the period in question. But he's also super-inconsistent about using macrons or not for long vowels and stuff like indicating `ayin or hamza versus not. It's possible that he's being stricter about transcription for common nouns than proper names, which makes a certain amount of sense, but a lot of these names are hardly well-known to Anglophone readers.
47: I read that a year ago, due to here, and that was completely invisible to me. Funny, given that a shift between pinyin and Wade-Giles or Japanese Romanizations would have stood out as awkward. Curse of knowledge and all that.
If we accept some grandfathered-in words, maybe "vizir" is reasonable (given a UK context). I feel weird using "Turino" and "Firenze" in English, not that I have too many opportunities to do so. Other inconsistencies are weird if we give credit for the romanization of least energy.
Well, I'm not actually 100% certain about the `ayin/hamza thing. He does seem to use them a lot, I'm just not sure it's everywhere they're warranted. He's definitely inconsistent about macrons, though. Arabic is different from Chinese-based scripts, however, in that it's easily possible to do an unambiguous symbol-for-symbol transliteration, it's just a matter of which symbols you choose.
I dunno, it seems pretty reasonable that if the Brits and their sheep loving antipodean cousins had won Gallipoli and shattered the Turkish army all of Western Turkey would have been severed and given to the Greeks (since that was in fact what Lloyd George tried to do after 1918) and that the rest would be under some kind of Anglo-French European mandate rule (since that's in fact what happened to the rest of the Ottoman Empire).
But the Brits (and French, and Australians) did actually shatter the Turkish army; it's just that they did it in 1918 rather than 1915. The only way you can say Gallipoli was "pivotal" is 37: that Gallipoli gives you Ataturk and therefore Turkish nationalism, which otherwise would not have existed. And this seems a bit dodgy given that, before and throughout the war, Turkey was being run by members of an explicitly Turkish nationalist movement called the Young Turks.
There is also a risk of presentism when you look at the current borders of the Turkish Republic as some sort of eternal "Turkish nation" with all the Turks inside it. That definitely wasn't the case in 1918. For a start, there were huge Greek populations in the west of Asia Minor - giving "Western Turkey" to the Greeks was not much odder than giving Alsace to the French (or Salonika to the Greeks, for that matter). Second, there were a lot of Turkic types outside the borders of the Empire, and this was still very much a concern of the Pan-Turkic ideologues like Enver Pasha - that's how he ended up dying while charging a Red Army machine gun nest on horseback outside Dushanbe. To him, Dushanbe was as Turkish as Ankara. Third, of course, even modern Turkey has a lot of very vocal non-Turks in it still unassimilated and ungenocided. There's no a priori good reason in 1918 why Diyarbakir is obviously part of Eternal Turkey and, say, Mosul is not.
Dushanbe, as the name suggests, would more properly be part of Eternal Iran.
Pan-Turkic ideologues like Enver Pasha
See also, Chapter 22.
50
Pretty much agree but a Turkish nationalism without Ataturk would have been a very different thing. In any case, we tend to forget that "nationalism" as a concept was pretty new in both southeastern Europe and the territories of the Ottoman Empire.
As far as the Greeks go, there were wildly different estimates of how many Greeks there were in Asia Minor. Shockingly, the Greek government said "a yuge! number" and the Turks said "hardly any." It is agreed that the areas around (e.g.) Smyrna had a lot but once you got away from the city the uncertainty rises pretty quickly. Same thing with formerly Austro-Hungarian littoral of the Adriatic Sea, especially Fiume and Trieste. Exactly how many Italians were really living there?
50: If the Turks had been shattered in 1915 the Entente would have have been in Constantinople in 1915, rather than 1918, when (as we all well know by now) internal Entente politics were utterly different. At that time Russia was still a power, Wilsonianism wasn't in play, and some Ottoman territory might have made a good bribe for Italy. You're right that something like Ataturkism existed anyway, but a republican Turkey retreating to Anatolia in 1915 wouldn't get aid from Bolshevik Russia, and would (potentially at least) have massive Russian armies at its rear.
But also in 1915 the Arab Revolt hadn't kicked off yet - nor had the Armenian Genocide. And the Sykes-Picot Agreement hadn't been signed, nor had the Balfour Declaration, nor the Siege of Kut. A defeated Ottoman Empire in 1915 might have had to give up some of its territory, especially in Thrace, but it might have had a reasonable expectation of staying substantially intact. Interesting alternate history anyway.
AIUI the Arab Revolt had virtually no military significance, and politically its absence would on the face of it make partitions easier; absence of genocide and Balfour Declaration likewise, as ethnicity would be less of an issue all round. And how does the Siege of Kut matter? The victory was costly, and so the victors needed needed more spoils? Maybe, but OTOH both Britain and France could certainly have used some visible prizes to show their people in 1915. All round, I get the feeling this alt-hist might have been a lot less cursed the peace-to-end-all-peace that actually happened.
I've always found the divergent careers of Ataturk and Enver Pasha to be kind of fascinating. They both started off similarly as Young Turk reformers, but one ended up as the founder of a stable, democratic, independent Turkish state, and the other ended up as a flaky adventurer who got killed pursuing a delusional empire building scheme.
OTOH both Britain and France could certainly have used some visible prizes to show their people in 1915.
The visible prize would have been, presumably, victory. Having the Fleet moored up in the Bosphorus would be a much more visible prize than "hooray! The Union Jack now flies over the vilayet of Mosul!"
one ended up as the founder of a stable, democratic, independent Turkish state
Um, bad news on that last week.
Um, bad news on that last week.
Well, they had a pretty good run.
Erdogan is just closing the circle.
59: Good point, but this is still the era of annexations. Hence for instance, Sykes-Picot.
All round, I get the feeling this alt-hist might have been a lot less cursed than the peace-to-end-all-peace that actually happened.
Oh, I'm definitely with you on that one. If one of the Central Powers gets knocked out in 1915, then maybe a negotiated peace is easier - because it's still Asquith and Briand in power, not Clemenceau and Lloyd George.
In other words - Ataturk: history's greatest monster.
BTW, was Gallipoli actually Ataturk's victory, or the German adviser's? Or in fact really British incompetence? One of the frustrating things with this book is the vast new vistas of known unknowns that open on every page.
But everyone nominates him for greatest monster. So passé.
66: British incompetence. Or, more charitably, British lack of experience in mounting combined operations.
Ataturk was not in command at Gallipoli - he was just a lieutenant-colonel in charge of one of the five infantry divisions, and prepared his troops so poorly that one of his regiments ran out of ammunition within a few hours of the landings and was wiped out.
A big part of the Ataturk myth is his order to them: ""I do not order you to fight, I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can come forward and take our places". And this all sounds jolly good and heroic at this distance in time, but it is definitely not the kind of thing that you as an infantry battalion commander want to hear coming over the brigade net, especially not from the idiot who is just about to get you all killed because in the last month that you spent digging and wiring yourself in to your prepared position he has somehow forgotten to give you enough machine-gun rounds. What you want to hear is something more along the lines of "Don't you worry, Jules. I am on the motherfucker. You two sit tight and wait for the Wolf, who will be there directly." This the men of 57 Infantry did not hear.
The overall commander (not adviser) was a German, Liman von Sanders. He is not quite so prominent in the Ataturk myth, but he did a good job, although he had the ground on his side. (Ataturk, incidentally, thought that Sanders' defensive plan was wrong because Ataturk didn't believe in flexible defence. Sanders overruled him.)
Also "In the time which passes until we die" - "we" in this case means "you". Ataturk was not about to get killed trying to fight off a Commonwealth division with bayonets and clubs only. He was fine.
And in the British defence, amphibious assaults against prepared defences are very difficult indeed. Normandy was an example of one that went really well and even that was bloodier (in proportion) than the Somme. The Germans lost most of their surface navy trying one against Norway. The Canadians got mauled at Dieppe, the Americans at Tarawa, the Japanese at Wake.
66 is great, and not just because it confirms my bias against national heroes.
69.4: I should have known that Sanders was to blame somehow.
bloodier (in proportion) than the Somme
Didn't know this either. My dad is an Ataturk fan and I look forward to dropping 66 on him sometime.
72 is dyslexic I think.
69 -- Ataturk's speech makes an interesting contrast with the Patton speech which I think is at the start of the Patton movie which may be all that I saw of the movie (bow before my expertise!). He says something like he's not impressed by soldiers willing to die for their country, he wants soldiers who will make the poor saps on the other side die for their country.
If Ataturk had really been badass, he would have been portrayed in a movie by George C. Scott.
76: Bela Lugosi seems like the obvious choice.
74: I think that's right. There was a higher casualty rate per thousand troops per day during the Normandy campaign (not just D-Day) than during the battle of the Somme (not just 1 July 1916).
Or an old Peter Cushing, for that matter. Stick some blue cubes on his jacket and Ataturk is basically Tarkin.
This is reinforcing my theory that "Star Wars" is just a retelling of the Anglo-German naval rivalry of 1900-1916.
"There seems to be something wrong with our bloody moon-sized planet-obliterating space stations today."
The Star Wars universe has never been able to decide whether its capital ships are Dreadnoughts or aircraft carriers.
Why is 72 dyslexic? Is my neuroscience-informed irony too much for you?
I don't think they ever actually engage each other. The Empire has those huge triangular jobs that look like steam irons, and the Death Star of course, and the Rebel Alliance has a variety of blobs, but I don't remember a steam iron ever shooting at a blob or vice versa. All the fighting seems to be fighter vs. fighter, fighter vs. enormous battlewagon, or Death Star vs. enormous battlewagon.
49: I've read some books that adopt an explicit policy of rigorous transliteration (ayin, hamza, macrons, dots under consonants) for the first appearance of a term only, and ease off after that. The rationale I guess being to provide all the information once, but after that not to slow down reading by making everyone's name look like a porcupine.
82: They can of course be both, given actual decks aren't necessary in vacuum. But Lucas was working pre-Battlestar Galactica, and therefore didn't have that solution to plagiarize.
I feel weird using "Turino" and "Firenze" in English, not that I have too many opportunities to do so.
Also Munich/München. Several others that escape me now, including one associated with perfumery? Help me out.
The most unrealistic thing about Star Wars is not that, on examining its stolen plans, the Rebels discover that the Death Star has a crucial and catastrophic flaw that leaves it open to destruction, but that they only discover one such flaw. On a realistic military project of that scale, there should be hundreds.
The UK has just spent billions on the six Type 45 destroyers, only to discover that the engines don't work in warm water and when they complained to the builder, the builder said (accurately) that nowhere in the contract had the Royal Navy said that it would like its ships to be able to operate in warm water.
88: "Our new battleships are indestructible as long as they don't get wet."
Episode 6.5: Admiral Tarkin, interned with his stormtroopers, outmaneuvers Admiral Ackbar and scuttles the Imperial Star Destroyer fleet in the Hoth asteroid field.
including one associated with perfumery?
UPDATE: I was thinking of Cologne/Köln.
Or Grand Moff, I guess. (He was canonically killed at the end of 6 but I refuse to be confined.)
From Wikipedia:
In June 2016 defence chiefs admitted that the ships were breaking down because the Northrup Grumman intercooler could not cope with the warm waters of the Gulf. Manufacturers Rolls-Royce of the fully functioning, non-problematic turbines said that the intercoolers for the WR-21 had been built as specified, but that conditions in the Middle East were not "in line with these specs".
I was pwned because BAE Systems is responsible for delivering my comments on schedule.
So, more oil burned, more atmospheric CO2, more defense against the British.
92: Oh, I read 87 as sarcastic. I was going to make a comment that it's weird how most of the European cities with surviving English exonyms were in the H.R.E., until I realized that there are way more than that. It still seems to be mostly a German/Italian phenomenon.
95 That's pretty warm. Still you'd expect there to be a spec of temp ranges there and that someone would make sure that it included some of the likely areas of deployment.
85 That's a weird solution, maybe I've even seen it myself but since I know what it should be I'm not noticing.
88-94: That's some wilful dickery from the contractors. And serious oversight in the specs.
98: It still seems to be mostly a German/Italian phenomenon.
Apart from European capital cities, which almost all have English exonyms (good word): Moscow, Paris, Athens, Prague, Warsaw, Vienna etc. But non-capitals tend not to, outside Germany and Italy.
100: indeed, especially as the Royal Navy hasn't actually been in combat operations anywhere except warm water for the last 20 years. It's been the Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and West Africa.
Apparently once upon a time the name was Munichen, and it just got corrupted two different ways.
98 et seq are interesting. I bet there's a thesis to be written there. Also a Gladwellesque popular book about how the fragmentation of the Empire promoted mercantile city states.
101: Not sure if I'd count Paris since that's just pronouncing the French word in an Englishy way. While looking into this I found that I've been mispronouncing Calais by saying it in the French way, with the stress on the second syllable. Back when it was English soil there was also a much more straightforward English pronunciation of it, like "kallis."
102: Maybe you could stir up trouble again in the Falklands? Just make sure to motor through the tropics quickly.
104: Your quasi-national over-state needs to break up into at least ten thousand city states to achieve true market dominance.
Gladwell better not actually do it, because there are way too many bad actors right now who would just lap that up.
Thinking more, what are the exceptions. Seville, The Hague (interesting the 'The' survived), Porto (?) Cracow.
Not sure if I'd count Paris since that's just pronouncing the French word in an Englishy way.
Well, a lot of the others (Cologne, Prague) are just pronouncing and spelling the German word in a Frenchy way.
87. Copenhagen/København, Moscow/Moskva, The Hague/Den Haag. OTOH, who calls Livorno Leghorn any more?
Nobody talks about Livorno anymore. Cities with exonyms are the ones that foreigners talk about. The French say "Londres" but I doubt they have their own name for Colchester.
"Oporto" is new to me. People who say that should call the country Oportugal.
Manufacturers Rolls-Royce of the fully functioning, non-problematic turbines said that the intercoolers for the WR-21 had been built as specified, but that conditions in the Middle East were not "in line with these specs".
So when does the Straits of Hormuz Development Authority start taking bids on how to make the water confirm to the specs?
Elsinore/Helsingfors.
And a lot of biblical/near East locations: Damascus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Tyre, Sidon, Babylon, Armageddon etc.
113 s/b "Would it not be easier in that case to drain the Persian Gulf and install another?"
If they could actually do 113, it might entail socieconomic development sufficient to obviate foreign military presence.
Spanish speakers say "Nuevo York": do they also say "Nuevo London" or "Nuevo Hampshire"?
Elsinore and Leghorn look good for the mercantile hypothesis.
Elsinore/Helsingfors.
You just blew my mind.
Oporto was common when I was a kid; never hear it now. By contrast A Coruña tends to lose its article in English even when it isn't called Corunna.
121: I think 99% of the time it's referred to in English it has an article, but not that article, because it's in the phrase "Deportivo de La Coruña".
And the other 1% I suppose it's quoting that stupid poem, "The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna".
A Coruña tends to lose its article in English even when it isn't called Corunna.
Is A Coruña a thing? I've only seen La Coruña. And how do people say Corunna? ko-Run-uh?
Koenigsberg is pronouncing Kaliningrad the Prussian way.
La Coruña is Castillian/Castellano; A Coruña is Galician/Gallego. Take your choice. Galician is basically a dialect of Portuguese that got left behind in Spain.
Surely there's some 18th-century English word for Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad that can be dredged up like "Leghorn". Or we can create one. Maybe something like "Clonningsborough".
Ignore that that joke requires a berg/burg mixup.
126: Learn something every day!
Galicia is the Spanish region nobody notices because it's not making waves the way Catalunya and Euskadi do. But Galician is an official language just as much as Basque and Catalan. The Galicians basically sit around and collect tourist dollars from pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela.
The rule is European non-capitals that are neither Hre nor Italian. I actually think we could dispense with Italian, since Naples would be the only exception. So far we have:
Elsinore
Seville
Porto
Krakow is debatable, I think it used to be the capital of something or other.
Everywhere used to be the capital of something or other, if only of itself.
Exonyms: not just for English speakers French list; Czech has a bunch-- Mnichov for Munchen (word indicates place of Monks), Cařihrad for Istanbul (emperor's castle), Benatky for Venice.
Also, this may be my best ever oppurtunity to mention my favorite anomaly: Bluefields, Nicaragua.
Bruges (imported French!) Ostend, Antwerp.
||
Apparently Sanders is being lined up to actually nominate Clinton. This will be fun.
|>
That French exonym list has Germany and Italy broken out into separate articles. Tortuga also good for mercantilism.
Ditto the Netherlands. Commerce FTW!
I find myself thinking and saying Lothringen and Elsass pretty regularly. I blame the Saarlodris, although they're not actually related to Lothringen.
Same pattern for English exonyms, -Netherlands +Ireland+India. Strikingly, not for France.
I find myself thinking and saying Lothringen and Elsass pretty regularly
Not everyone is as big a Tolkein fan as you.
Hanover was in the Empire. The German exonym list is a recap of the Drang nach Osten.
"Lyon" and "Marseille" are supposedly "Lyons" and "Marseilles" in English, but I think that goes on the "archaic" list with Leghorn.
It had to happen once: ajay is wrong on the internet
Helsingfors is Helsinki in Swedish
Elsinore is Helsingør
The ferry from Helsingør goes to Helsingborg
What about Bombay? Rangoon? Calcutta?
Just make your pseud lowercase and you're all set for a poetic career.
English exonyms for bits of France tend to be regional rather than cities: Burgundy; Brittany; Gascony (used to be part of the empire); Picardy...
Yet Van Helsing is presumably Dutch.
Wikipedia claims that at one point in the thirteenth century the Kingdom of Sicily (all of Italy South of Rome) was part of the HRE, but I am skeptical. I think it may have just been a possession of the house of Hohehenstaufen.
I don't actually think the Holy Roman Empire has anything to do with it. I think there are two main vectors for exonyms:
a) from French through the Normans (e.g. Aachen becomes Aix-la-Chapelle)
or
b) through links with important trade cities, as in Leghorn and Porto.
The Hohehenstaufen, the funnier junior branch of the better-known Hohenstaufen.
The Whohehenstaufen, the least-known branch of the family
Opinionated Libertarians would argue trade cities arose disproportionately in the Empire due to weaker government, and I think some medievalists give that theory some credence.
Though the direction of causation would of course be disputed.
I think it may have just been a possession of the house of Hohehenstaufen.
Hey, what am I, chopped liver?
The Werhehenstafen, in the original German.
Bombay's an interesting one: it's an English variant of a Portuguese name, in India. There wasn't much of a town there before the Portuguese, so their name, while an exonym, can be considered original. Mumbai is an indigenous neologism. This page is shockingly brief; I don't get the impression that it was a very important area then. However, we do get a further exonym: Ptolemy new the vague geography of the area and called it Heptanesia. Alas, I haven't yt found what Bombay Island was called beforehand.
Mycenae, but I think that may be cheating because almost all Greek Ks are rendered into English as Cs
Ithaca/Ithaki
Salonica/ Thessaloniki (but does anyone still say Salonica? I remember the Salonica Campaign from the Times History of the Great War in my prep school library)
And perhaps disproportionately in Italy, given how much coastline they have.
I think you mean Carlos II, señor.
If we're expanding beyond Europe, Canton has always puzzled the hell out of me.
In fact, Carlos I. Filthy extranjeros.
165: Also the Portuguese, who called it Cantão. This probably holds for almost anywhere with a weird name in maritime Asia.
Let's not get started on Ireland
Yes, let's not, since to do so would involve being able to spell Gaelic place names, with accents and all.
Dublin's interesting: the English exonym is derived from a native term "Dubh Linn"--black pool--which refers to a specific area in town. The Irish name is also native but just happens to come from a different neighborhood: Baile Átha Cliath, "town of the hurdled ford." ("Baile" = "town" and is the origin of all the "Bally"s throughout Ieland) Both are probably obsolete, given modifications to the Liffey.
165: Wiki thinks It's just a corruption of the the Chinese, which happened also to sound like an apposite word in Portuguese. But I don't trust wiki on history, so. Buttercup?
Canton not that puzzling given that the province is Guangdong, surely.
Oh, vaguely related: Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni got his surname from his father (unsurprisingly) who in turn got it because he was a museveni, in other words a "man of the Seventh", in this case 7th Battalion King's African Rifles.
And the King's African Rifles were expanded to meet the needs of WWI in East Africa. Combined and separate development of threads!
Japan is a big one, wiki has a lot of detail on etymology, no idea about how reliable it is.
Can=Guang just never occurred to me. I guess it makes as much sense as Leghorn.
174: Composting toilets are better for the environment.
Then we have exonyms like Canton and Cairo, which have cities in the US named after them, but whose names are pronounced differently from the exonym.
178: Lima in Ohio which was named after the city in Peru because the quinine that saved the early settlers from malaria came from there.
(at least that's what I heard someone say on a local public radio station once)
175: Obligatory Language Log post.
There are actually two ways to pronounce the characters for "Japan" (日本) in Japanese: Nippon (usually used prewar, sounds stronger, some people regard it as having militaristic overtones) and Nihon (used much more often postwar, sounds softer and friendlier). The government tends to use Nippon for most things, but people switch between them depending on location and context: there is a place called 日本橋 in both Tokyo (Nihombashi) and Osaka (Nipponbashi), and people shout "Nippon! Nippon!" at a football match whereas the word for the Japanese language itself is always Nihongo.
I don't know which names are technically official, but a common Chinese name for San Francisco, enough to be the first name given on zh.wikipedia.org, is 旧金山, Old Gold Mountain.
I've heard that before and I think it's reasonably standard.
The only non-trivial Irish exonym I know of for somewhere outside of Ireland and Britain is "Talamh an Éisc" for Newfoundland: the land of fish.
181 is fascinating. I often see both Nippon and Nihon and wondered whether it was a transliteration thing. That would not have occurred to me. Was one pronunciation original, or are they both as old as the country?
185: I don't know. The Language Log post I linked above has a comment that suggests that in medieval Japan, "Nippon" was used in Noh plays to indicate a Chinese accent, and "Nihon" a native Japanese speaker. So the dual usage goes back a long way. But it's extremely common in Japanese for the same characters to have multiple possible pronounciations (e.g. according to Toyota the company's name was changed from the usual reading of Toyoda because in katakana Toyoda トヨダ is written with 10 brushstrokes whereas Toyota トヨタ only uses 8, a lucky number, though it's still written with the same kanji), so having two alternatives for 日本 doesn't feel at all weird.
185: Wikipedia goes into excruciating detail.