] As I understand it, Mallorca is more the local way of spelling it - Majorca is the English speaking way derived from Castillian Spanish.

Most countries have their own name that they use, but there is a different name that foreigners use. Beijing/Peking was mentioned above. "Beijing" is the Chinese name for the city (albeit written out alphabetically). The pronunciation of that does not sit well on Western tongues, and so we've (I say "we've" as I'm writing from the U.S.) beat it about until it is easier for us to make, "Peking". When the Japanese borrowed our word "ice cream" it was incompatable with Japanese words, which (roughly) follow a pattern of a consonant-vowel syllable. They don't use consonant clusters (like "cr") as we do. So this word was hammered around until it came out as the Japanese "aisukuriimu".

It's not so much a matter of not beign able to pronounce it at all. I can certainly pronounce "Firenze" (hope I spelled it right). But the English speakers tend to have a great dislike of foreign sounding words. Our language is full of words from just about every other language on the planet, but you would never be able to tell that we've borrowed so many words. Think of the poor immigrant named "Polinowski" given the innocuous, rather insipid name "Pole". But this tendency is not limited to the English-speaking world. Look at some of the English words that have been borrowed into other languages. Does anyone know any examples of this? Words kind of "nativized" when borrowed into a particular language?