Tag Info

This is a wide-ranging question that perhaps permits many answers, e.g. of both linguistic and political kinds. Sometimes renaming a town was a way of exerting a (outside) ruler's power: e.g. what was once Königsberg is now Kaliningrad, what was once Vindobona is now Wien (Vienna). Notice that it's not always straightforward to determine what the "right" ...

Probably has much to do with phonetics, and of course in case of different alphabets errors in transliteration. So Karel in Dutch becomes Karl in German, Charles in French and English, Carlos in Spanish. Nothing to do with them being royals, it happens with all names (and other words). I never give my actual first name to foreigners who don't speak my ...

In Russian there is a similar convention. For example, we refer English monarchs by German-like names. I think the origin of this convention is pragmatism. Many monarchs changed their country by marriage. Some monarchs were sovereigns of two or more countries with different language. As such it is difficult to define the "true" ethnicity of many monarchs ...