LogFAQs > #978641599

EclairReturns posted...

This may be an inappropriate analogy, but English-speaking folk do not typically refer to that Japanese archipelago country by its Japanese name. Similarly, the Japanese do not normally refer to their country by the name English-speaking folk have assigned to it.

Germany's an even more pronounced example. You've got Germany in English, Deutschland in German, Allemagne in French, Tyskland in Scandavian languages, Niemcy in Polish... That largely boils down to the history of what various cultures called the region as their respective languages developed, and you can trace the etymology of some of them (like Italian is Germania, which is obviously related to what English settled on), but the bottom line is that there are a whole bunch of seemingly-unrelated names for the country depending on who you ask.

I do think it's a reasonably apt analogy, though. The aliens should expect that we would continue to call it Earth, but so should we expect that they continue to call it Scrimbiblior. Neither their name nor ours is necessarily incorrect, we just each keep using what's familiar (putting aside for a second the fact that it's not "Earth" in every Earth language, so it's not like we have consensus even now).