Talk:Italian exonyms

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Exonyms have nothing to do with explain the meaning of words, but rather with providing historical information. Travelbird 00:44, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I was referring to a translation dictionary, not the other kind. Either way, I don't really see any historical information in here. Can you elaborate on what you mean ? Right now I'm still very much inclined to take this to Afd -- Hirudo 01:03, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I can see how listing the exonyms for a group of people can be of use on the article about that group of people. I don't see the use of an article like this which does nothing but list the exonyms used by a group of people -- Hirudo 01:05, 13 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I doesn't - but that is so with all subjects. The subject will not be of interest to everyone naturally, very much like a list of chemical elements will also not interest everyone.
 * If you delete this page you will have to delete all other lists on Wikipedia as well, Lists of exonyms have been well established, e.g. Names of European cities in different languages has been around for over 6 months. This list (lalong with others) is just listing these sorted by country, because the above list has become to large and would be unusable if you added all towns. Travelbird 01:52, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
 * It's not a matter of interest or not. Your argument about Names of European cities in different languages is valid though, and since there's obviously consensus about that I won't take this any further -- Hirudo 02:19, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

What is the criterion here? The Italian name of cities located in South Tyrol, Italy, is considered as an exonym regardless whether the majority of the population has Italian as primary language or not. The Italian name of cities in Croatia that are historically connected to Italy and that in some cases are nowadays bilingual Croatian/Italian is also consider an exonym. What is then an exonym? An Italian name of any city that in any point in time has got a non-Italian majority? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.232.23.186 (talk) 22:05, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

I Agree with the last comment. All Italian name of cities located in South Tyrol are official italian names of those cities. Many of them are city renaming if you want (Vipiteno to say one), but not exonyms. Unless you want to say that "New York" is an exonym of "New Amsterdam". Francesco —Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.224.6.106 (talk) 21:02, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree too. --Eldomm (talk) 18:40, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Why?
Who, other than their authors, looks at such pages? What's the use of an endless list of examples of the obvious fact that each language adapts foreign words to its own phonology? If you find such lists useful, please tell me how. —Tamfang (talk) 21:45, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

I agree: almost none of these names could be considered exonyms, unless someone is trying to make hay out of the trivial fact that the Italian language generally makes names end in vowels, so of course "Celtic" becomes "Celtico." To be interesting and to keep the definition useful, an exonym should be fundamentally different (like Suomi/Finland or Deutschland/Germany), not a minuscule and reasonable accommodation of the language's spelling and grammar. For example, this page gives "Tirana" as an Italian exonym for the Albanian "Tiranë," even though they're pronounced the same and the Italian alphabet is forced to substitute a letter for "ë" because Italian doesn't have that character. Another example is calling the Italian "Cile" an exonym for the Spanish "Chile," even though they're pronounced identically; if the Italian were spelled "Chile," it would be pronounced with a K sound and therefore cease to be a phonetic match. Silliest of all is the claim that the Italian "Axum" is an exonym for that Ethiopian city, which in the local Tigrinya and Amharic languages is spelled ኣኽሱም and አክሱም respectively, both of which are pronounced "Axum"; is it an exonym because ordinary Italians don't write it in the Tigrinya or Amharic alphabets? I'm not convinced this article is worth keeping, but for it to become accurate and useful, more than 90% of these place names would have to be deleted. RCTodd (talk) 18:19, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

I'd overlooked this gem: apparently the Italian "Perù" is meant to be an exonym for the Spanish "Perú" because the accent is grave rather than acute. RCTodd (talk) 18:29, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

I looked at this page to see what names Italians give foreign places that are different from their English counterparts. This, after reading in a newspaper about "Napoli" instead of Naples. I noted that in the Wikipedia article "endonym" is misspelled throughout.—Torontonian1 (talk) 15:21, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Links to disambiguation pages
This article contains over 20 links to disambiguation pages, mostly in the "Canton of the Grisons" section. Could you help to direct these to specific pages, if not I am tempted to remove the links.&mdash; Rod talk 12:56, 22 December 2022 (UTC)