What do you call the capital of China, The People's Republic of China? What do you call the city divided by the Bosphorus? What do you call the country of which that city is the largest? What do you call the country of which Prague is the capital?
Any country can rename cities however they want, they can't erase the fact that they were called something else in the past, and that people remember the previous name.
Saint Petersburg was renamed to Petrograd, then Leningrad and then Saint Petersburg again but when Germans sieged the town in 1941, it was Leningrad.
But if your point is more about how people call them, well you're going down another rabbit hole with me.
Just for Belgium, all the major international cities have a name in the 3 official languages. (Dutch, French and German) : Cairo in Egypt is called Caïro (D), Le Caire (F) and Kairo(G).
There I've never met anyone using "Beijing" for the capital of China, it's always "Pékin"(F) and "Peking"(D). [1] [2]
And within Belgium itself, many towns have their names in the 3 languages; Liège (F), Luik (D) and Lüttich(G).
(But other have only one like Knokke, Dinant or Eupen).
This can lead to many interesting situations, especially with the peculiar linguistic situation in Belgium :
- Anyone speaking their native language will use the name from that language : Mechelen in Dutch, Malines in French and Mecheln in German.
- Speaking in French with a Dutch native, they usually use the Dutch name.
If they are willing to use the French name, they'll switch to it if you didn't catch it in Dutch, otherwise, they'only use the Dutch name. [3]
- Speaking English with a French or Dutch native, they'll use the English name if it's Brussels and their language's name any other time, wherever it's located.
For cities in the Dutch speaking part, French natives will always use Anvers(F) for Antwerpen (D), Gand(F) for Gent(D) (even though it is Ghent in English).
For cities in the French speaking part, Dutch will always use Namen(D) for Namur(F) or Bergen(D) for Mons(F)
- French native often need to specify which city they are talking about when using "Louvain" because it can refer to Leuven or Louvain-la-Neuve.
- And everyone want that cities only be called with the name from their linguistic region... hence the first post that said that it's now called Leuven.
3. Which brings me to my true story of meeting a guy from France that only knew the town Luik and never heard of Liège. Nobody in Liège call it Luik, just like nobody in Leuven call it Louvain.
I think you missed their point, for instance you call it Constantinople when talking about events before the Ottomans took it over, and Istanbul after.
The French university was re-founded in Louvain-la-Neuve, an atypical and fairly successful planned city. It has some small community character and a whimsical architecture that's more trying to be cozy rather than impressive. Recommended for architecture enthusiasts.
It (Leuven) has always been a Dutch speaking town. Well, the majority of the population that is. The administration (city, university) started using French at some point (19th century - mid 20th century).
clarification: used french in the 19th-century until mid 20th century.
Anyway, the fact that the university was still giving some courses in French in 1968 in what was officially a Flemish University caused the "Leuven Vlaams" student riots.
I live in Leuven and you can clearly see that in the middle ages, they spoke dutch here. The switch to French and back is visible in the street names (because often they carry all 3 names). A funny example: The "grasmusstraat" (now) was "Rue Erasmus" in the 19th century and "grasmusstroike" in the middle ges. Apparently the French civil servants didn't know that a grasmus is a little bird and renamed it after a famous alumnus.
