[WikiEN-l] English names

Wik raised an interesting point in an edit summary re: [[Gdansk]]: On one level, I think he's right, but I think he's drawing the wrong conclusion. Bear with me here... Does Michael Jackson have a Russian name? I don't think so; he's an American pop artist. He's not "Mikhail Jakovitch" or any such thing. Even if some Russians decided to translate his name into their language, that wouldn't mean it was his real name. Gdansk doesn't "have an English name". It has an official Polish name, and it has also had a German name. On the other hand, English speakers and map-makers and geography teachers have /applied/ English names to countless places. We used to call the capital of mainland China "Pekin" or "Peking", but around 10 or 20 years ago there was a big re-shuffle and we adopted a closer transliteration: "Beijing". The capital of the USSR (and still capital of Russia) is Moskva (or Moscow, I forget which). We're an English-language encyclopedia, we have to call places /something/. Moscow doesn't have an English name per se; it's a Russian city with a Russian name. But English-speaking people have been referring to it with the /English word/ 'Moscow'. Now, whether its Oder River or Odra River, Gdansk or Danzig, we English speakers /give/ English names to everything. We have to, if we are to speak of them at all. This doesn't mean we are changing its name or endorsing some version of its name. One of the first thing any English speaker does when learning a foreign language is to find out the native names for the countries which speak that language. No one in Japan calls it "Japan"; it's Nihon or Nippon, without any hint of a "J" sound. French call it "Japon", but that doesn't mean Japan has a French name. It just means that French speakers use the word /Japon/ to refer to it. Its real name is not disturbed or altered by what foreigners call it. I hope this provides a basis for ending the year-long battle over Gdansk and Odra/Oder. Ed Poor, aka Unsolved Equation