toponymic query

[Beverly Flanigan]

Exonym, endonym--I prefer shibboleth.  But when I use this word in my
classes, no one recognizes it.  But then, when I mentioned Kofi Annan in
class this morning, no one recognized that name either.

At 03:30 PM 11/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>I happened to come across the following in Charles Harrington Elster's
>_Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations_ this morning (s.v. Moscow, p.
>267):
>
>"The Russian name for _Moscow_ is _Moskva_, pronounced muhsk-VAH or
>mahsk-VAH. _Moscow_ therefore is an exonym, a useful term that has
>appeared in various monographs on language (incluing William Safire's
>column in _The New York Times_) but that to my knowledge has yet to be
>recorded in a dictionary [n.b. it's in American Heritage but not
>OED--I have yet to do a more thorough search.] In _Crazy English_
>(1989), wordsmith Richard Lederer defines _exonym_ as 'a place name
>that foreigners use instead of the name that natives use: _Cologne_
>for Koln, _Florence_ for Firenze, _Morocco_ for Maroc.'"
>
>....etc. Seems related, though not precisely what's being sought, which
>would be more like an endonym--at least according to the terms of the
>original query.
>
>Abigail Zitin
>OED