> I don`t know if you live in Germany, > but we DO say Halle (Saale) (without > pronouncing the parenthesis. 

This is clearly nitpicking, the name is Halle, (Saale) is an admistrative name to differentiate between this city and the town in Westfalen. The actual name is simply Halle.

The point of my argument was that nobody calls it like that, unless he has to, and obviously if he has to he will not pronounce the brackets, but I wrote that to highlight the fact that (Saale) can't be the common name because it has brackets, which do not develop naturally in the name of a city.