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(Long post. TL;DR: I’m presenting the Esperanto community and I am
looking for instances where there is no default language involved
around the renderer.)<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:d3b29e69ec77ff91d73019e0b4ece709@xs4all.nl">IMHO that is
more a "he says, she says" argument than anything valid. To me it
comes more across that a small community wants to push its own
agenda.
<br>
That may be unfair because I don't know how big the Esperanto
community is, so it is IMHO.
<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite">I am biased. I don't know Esperanto.
Therefore I would be against rendering everything that is not
nation-specific in Esperanto.
<br>
</blockquote>
<p>Maybe it would be helpful if I can quickly present the language
and its community here. This is not meant to be exhaustive, but
may help the discussions. I will try to be extra-short, but I’m
not super good at that: if you want to skip it, just jump to the
line starting with “Anyway, all that to say that”.<br>
</p>
<p>It is a small community (about 2 million speakers in 2005). It
however is internationally recognised as a great community-driving
community, as illustrated by its presence (through TEJO) in the
United Nation as a key role to coordinate local actions towards
vulnerable populations, particularly the ones that has linguistic
issues and suffer from the overall forceful usage of the English
language.</p>
<p>The main driving force of Esperanto is not its number of
speakers, but its simplicity to learn (Piron, 1994 ; Flochon,
2000) compared to other languages and its propedeutical nature
(that is, it helps learning other languages). As a rough estimate,
studies suggest that it takes up to 10 times less time to reach a
fluent level in Esperanto than a fluent level in English for
Europeans. Non-Europeans need indeed more time, but still much
less time than to learn languages such as English or French.
Furthermore, this simplicity of the language does not come with
loss of expressivity: as a French native speaker and Esperanto
speaker, I have huge trouble translating what I say in Esperanto
to French, as French is missing some crucial notions in some
contexts.<br>
</p>
<p>Most roots of Esperanto are from Roman and Slavic languages.
However, in contrary to most languages, words in Esperanto are
rarely just one root. The language is highly agglutinative and
comes with a handy set of suffixes that enable to get a whole
lexical field from a single root. For instance, “ĉevalo” means
horse, “ĉevalino” means mare, “ĉevalido” means colt, “ĉevalisto”
means horseman/groom, “ĉevalaro” means horse herd, etc. Of course,
these suffixes apply for any other animal: “ŝafo” means sheep, and
thus “ŝafino” is a ewe, “ŝafaro” is a “<span
class="tlid-translation translation" lang="en"><span title=""
class="">flock of sheep”, etc. So although the roots are
indeed Europe-centric, it is not that large an issue as root
importation has been restricted as much as possible: if a
combination of other words lead to the same result, the root
(usually) is not imported.<br>
</span></span></p>
<p>Probably the most important point: the goal of the Esperanto
community is not to overcome English in some kind of epic battle.
It is to provide language diversity and avoid language
imperialism. Hence, the main point of the community is not that
Esperanto should be used as the international language instead of
English, it’s that there should not be one unique international
language: Esperanto should be an international language, not the
international language ☺ Anyway, the Esperanto movement is
complex, and some parts of it just states that Esperanto should be
used for pragmatical reasons as it costs much less to teach it
than other languages (a good instance of this is
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapport_Grin">https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapport_Grin</a> ).<br>
</p>
<p>That was relatively long, and a bit out of the context — sorry
about that. I was hoping that it might help understand the goals
of some OSM-esperantists here (and in my experience, it seems that
actually many Esperantists use OSM compared to other communities!
I may be biaised on that).</p>
<p>Anyway, all that to say that I don’t think that using Esperanto
names for the “name” tags in places like oceans is a good idea: it
doesn’t even meet the goals of Esperantists themselves (well,
some, probably). 😅 That’s why I’m really in favor of just
removing this tags in such places.<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:d3b29e69ec77ff91d73019e0b4ece709@xs4all.nl">
Removing the name tag does not solve any problem. The renderer for
the map (or any program that needs to display the name tag) needs
to make a decision which tag to display. If the name tag is not
present it will have to fall back to another one.
<br>
In cases where you are running a program on your computer, this
decision might be easy: the language setting of your computer
(like JOSM does). In cases where you make something for a general
audience, that decision will not be so easy. Then you will get
into this discussion about "what language is used most" or "we
don't feel comfortable having an in our eyes non-neutral language
pushed up to us".
<br>
</blockquote>
<p>I agree that it does not entirely solve the problem. It however
partially solves it: in most contexts, there is a default language
defined. Be it the language of the computer (as you said for
JOSM), of the browser (and, if we look at the HTTP_ACCEPT header,
there might even be more than one!), or some rendering options. If
one is printing a map, there is generally a context around (the
language of the book, or the place—which is usually the same than
the computer’s on which the map is being generated).</p>
<p>Maybe I’ve misunderstood have you mean by “general audience”
here. I would greatly appreciate example where there is no
available default language indirectly provided by the user (’s
system) or context.<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:d3b29e69ec77ff91d73019e0b4ece709@xs4all.nl">
The problem arises out of one of the general OSM principles: use
the name that is verifiable on the ground. This does not work well
for oceans or any international body. No ocean has a sign affixed
to it with its name (well, there might be signposts in different
countries pointing to it).
<br>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a great point. To me, it seems to point to removing the
“name” tag on such places: this information doesn’t correspond to
anything “real” (but the “name:en” does). And I don’t even mind if
some careless renderers just use “name:en” as a default is the tag
“name” is absent: it’s something that should be parametric, but a
renderer might just have be designed specifically for English, so
whatever. <br>
</p>
<p>In any case, it would be great to add the eventual result of this
discussion on the wiki (be it as a footnote) in
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names">https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names</a> ☺</p>
<p>Regards,<br>
Martin.<br>
</p>
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