We could change the entire board:

Great Britain:

Clyde/Linne Chluaidh (Clyde is a river, the Scottish name refers to the coast along the Firth of Clyde)
Edinburgh/Dùn Èideann
Liverpool
London
Wales/Cymru
Yorkshire


Deutschland:

Berlin
Kiel
München
Ruhr
Preussen
Schlesien

France:

Bourgogne
Brest
Gascogne
Marseilles
Paris
Picardie

Holland/Nederland
België/Belgique
España
Portugal
Tunis

Italia:

Napoli
Piemonte
Puglia
Roma
Toscana
Venezia

Österreich-Ungarn/Osztrák–Magyar Monarchia:

Böhmen/Čechy
Budapest
Galizien
Tirol
Triest
Wien

Srbija
Shqipëri/Shqipëria
Elláda
Bulgaria
România

Devlet-i Âliye-i Osmâniyye/Türkiye:

Ankara
Armenistan
İzmir
Kostantiniyye
Sūriyya

Rossiyskaya Imperiya:

Liflyandiya
Moskva
Sankt-Peterburg
Sevastopol
Ukrayina
Warszawa

Suomi/Velikoe knjažestvo finljandskoe (Russian: Grand Duchy of Finland)
Sverige
Norge/Noreg
Danmark

The names of the places came from a book that Calhamer (the inventor) was using from the late 1800's. The exception being Picardy, which was Flanders in the book but he changed the name because of a fellow he knew. This is also the origin of what for me is a set of horrible name choices: England and Turkey as the book was very Anglophile oriented (England is really a two center country on the map). They should have been Great Britain or the UK and the Ottoman Empire.

Names are rather funny things on maps. In the Italian language Diplomacy map, the name of Munich is Monaco. The First French language map the people went out of their way to change as many province names as possible so that the players would help force the sale of the French game to their friends so that they could use the same notations. For example on the French map they change the French center from Marseilles to Toulon. They also change Wales to Cornwall and create things like Montenegro rather than Albania all of this just to be different.
Happily the new French game made by Wizards and Hasbro has returned to the most common used names as possible except where there are clear French names such as LaManche for the English Channel.

>Tunis

Should be ‘Tunisia’ (the name of a region instead of a city), since it's not a home SC.

>Armenistan

That'll get your arse kicked (j/k) in Little Armenia. Try ‘Hayastan’.

I've always wondered about that, actually. Why are some SC's countries, but others cities (And others still, regions)? Very inconsistent.

@Onar, there's a pattern.

Do tell? (aside from the major cities of major nations being named. That one is somewhat obvious).

"England" was actually a perfectly acceptable substitute for "Britain" well into the 1920's and beyond. Consider Nelson's "England expects..." and Vera Lynn (World War One) "There'll always be an England". In fact England (and this last according to wikipedia) is often used to refer to Britain in foreign languages.

Oh and Onar, home centres are named after cities, neutrals are countries.

I think the pattern is this: if the SC is part of a power (owned by a player) it is named for a city. Neutral SCs are countries (except Tunis).

[out typed by RiffArt]

You knew about the major cities. The non-SC provinces of the seven powers are regions of that country The neutrals are all countries, SC or not.

Wow, I'm slow.

"Logical" usually means "my subjective preferences rather than YOURS should control."

oh dear I've done it again

Well, in 1900 it was Istanbul not Constantinople...

Reminds me of the song by They Might be Giants. lol

Actually I think that the official name of Constantinople was not changed until after World War 1.

For a Scotsman, England was never an acceptable name for the country.
Instead there were just a massive amount of Anglophile behaviors that were woven into the reporting and history writers of the country. Political correctness, let along political accuracy was not a big factor in the late 1800's/

Official according to whom? Great Britain or what? I suppose you may be right that western Europe continued to refer to the city as Constantinople until rather late but I'm almost positive the Ottomans renamed it Istanbul the week they conquered it in 1453.

Does that mean they got to name it, officially? Because they raped and murdered the inhabitants? How sweet!

@ Toby Bartels: wrong, mate. Tunisia is called 'Tunis' in Arabian.
I used 'Armenistan' because I looked on the region as part of the Ottoman Empire, and so an Arabic name would suffice. I don't think the Ottomans liked 'Hayastan' too well.

@Thucydides: I'm going along with Edi on this. According to wikipedia the name of Constantinople was officially changed in 1930 (by the Turkish government, ofcourse).

@Knights Dawn - Actually, the traditional spelling of Bayern is Baiern. But one of Bavaria's leaders (I forget which one) liked the letter 'y' so much that he changed the spelling, and it's stuck that way ever since!

@Ursa

That's interesting about Tunisia. I don't think that it applies, for the same reason that the map says ‘Naples’ instead of ‘Napoli’, but I'm glad to learn it.