system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do we call some foreign cities by their native names (Berlin, Salerno, etc.) whereas others get an Anglicized name (Rome/Roma, Munich/Munchen)?
gpt
There's no real rule for this, but basically the more well-known the city is, the more likely it is to have a different name in other languages, especially if the native name is difficult to pronounce.

"München", for example, contains two sounds that don't exist in English. But that wasn't always the name of the city: about 1,000 years ago, its name (in Old High German) was "Munichen". All languages evolve and change over time, and this is true of names of cities as well. In English, "Munichen" gradually changed into "Munich", while in German it changed, through slightly different processes, into "München". We end up with different names.

If, on the other hand, you take a place like Tauberbischofsheim -- have you ever heard of it? Probably not, and it hasn't featured a lot in English literature. If it ever had a different name in English, we've lost track of it, so we just do our best to pronounce it the German way (and it's actually a bit easier than you might think -- certainly easier for a native English speaker than "München").

Berlin, on the other hand, is not as old as Munich. Not only that, but its name hasn't changed much over the centuries -- it's pretty much always been "Berlin" in German -- and it's pretty easy to pronounce. Why bother inventing a new name for it when "Berlin" is so easy to say?

Rome is an interesting one. In this case, the "E" on the end was originally pronounced -- 500 or so years ago, the "E" was never silent as it is today. "Rome", when it was first written in English, was pronounced "Ro-muh", very close to its Italian pronunciation. Back in those days, people were much less strict about spelling than they are now. They heard the Italian "Roma" and spelled out what they heard: "Rome", a good English spelling like "home" or "dome". In German, when they stopped pronouncing the second syllable, they also stopped writing it, so the German for "Rome" is simply "Rom". In English, we just kept the old spelling.

More distantly related languages cause additional problems. The city that used to be called "Peking" is now often called "Beijing". As you may know, Chinese is actually spoken in different dialects that are so different from each other, they might as well be different languages. The name of the city was originally composed of two Chinese characters, "north" and "capital", and means, very logically, "northern capital". How those characters are pronounced varies from place to place: when Europeans first arrived in China, they stayed in the ports in the south of the country, where the locals, speaking variants like Cantonese, pronounced the characters one way. It sounded to Europeans like "Peking", so that's what they called it. But the dialect spoken in the city itself is Mandarin, and in that variant the same characters are pronounced more like "Beijing". Many westerners have now taken the conscious decision to use the pronunciation the people who actually live there use, as opposed to the one used by the people who live in Hong Kong.

So, there isn't a simple answer to your question. But it's usually got something to do with history.