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Comment on Google Maps Renames Lake Ontario to Lake Americaparent

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Actually, that by itself isn't as stupid as it seems. Half of Lake Ontario is in the USA. Suppose that the USA actually had a legitimate, long-standing, respected name for the lake, different from Lake Ontario. It would be a good idea to include that name in maps. It's not simply a USA-centric exonym for a foreign lake; the lake is in the USA! The users of a map deserve to know that the lake is called something else by people on the southern shore.

But Munich, Nuremberg, the Baltic Sea etc... are not shown with both their English vs local names either when setting the Google Maps language to English despite the German names being completely different (and the Baltic Sea would need at least three names: it is also called the 'Eastern Sea' and the 'Western Sea'), and in the Sorbian minority region of Germany, the place names are also not printed in both German and Sorbian.

The issue is not one of showing a native name plus an English-language exonym. For the time being, the lake has two native, English-language names. Neither name is an exonym. Lake Ontario is not a Canadian lake being called by a different name by the USA.

Now suppose Tramp decreed that The Great Bear Lake in Canada should be called Star-Spangled Lake, effectively making that the USA's exonym for a place in Canada. And then suppose Google showed that name to visitors outside the USA, along side The Great Bear Lake. That would then be like (or even worse than) showing English-languge exonyms for German places to someone whose language is not indicated as English.

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