Jonah:

The best scholarly counterblast against this sort of nonsense was a paper delivered to the British Association for the Advancement of Science back in 1991. The paper’s title was “BEIJING OR PEKING? AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE DISPUTE ABOUT NAMES ON MAPS.” Dr. Sandford was (and for all I know still is) founder and director of the Center for Cartopedagogic Studies in Plymouth, UK. His letterhead (I engaged in correspondence with him back then) bills him as “Consultant at large in educational cartography and geography.” The BAAS paper is a gem of scholarly polemic, though he published similar things at a higher, less heated, level in The Cartographic Journal & elsewhere. I can’t find any of his stuff on the web, though there are references to him.

Sample from the BAAS paper (I’ve omitted some diacritical marks):

“ARE ALL COUNTRIES SO SUBSERVIENT TO THE WORD-MONGERS AS WE?
“No! We’re almost alone! Although we used to call Marseilles “ma sales,” as the French themselves used to, most of us are now persuaded to write Marseille as “ma say,” which is as sloppy as it is lazy. But do the French say Dover? Or Beachy Head? No! They do not! They say “doovr,” and write it Douvres; they say “ku-bay-vez-zee-aye,” and write it Cap Bevezier.
“I was comparing the Irish and English editions of a school atlas recently. The English edition actually gave the Irish names for Dublin and its outport, Dunleary; that is, it printed the names as Baile Atha Cliath and Dun Laoghaire. And all the other Irish places too. But did the Irish edition give the English names for places in Northern Ireland or elsewhere around the world? Oh no! The names were all in Irish (Erse).
“I do not quarrel with the actions of the Irish. My thesis is that it was perfectly correct and proper for them to use their names worldwide. My point is that, though we so often use foreign names, foreigners do not reciprocate by using ours. We’re under no moral or other compulsion to use foreign names, despite the UN and the BBC saying otherwise.
“Most countries are resisting this creeping linguistic cancer, the French in particular, while even the pragmatic Germans are revising their atlases to replace foreign names by traditional German ones.”

[Derb here] The only foreign atlas on my shelves here is a 1998 Chinese one. I just looked up Turin in it: “Du-ling.” Where’d they get the “g” from?