[Tagging] name of river/admin area

[Peter Wendorff]

Am 04.09.2012 08:23, schrieb Ronnie Soak:
> In Germany, this question is easier to answer.
> [...]
>
> This again is more often true for smaller towns. But we have some
> exceptions:
> 'Lutherstadt Wittenberg' (City of Luther, Wittenberg) is actually the
> full, official name of that city. How do we know? Well as everything
> else in Germany, this is tightly regulated and we just need to look at
> the official sign
> at the city border.
Wittenberg, on the other hand, has the suffix "berg", which literally 
translates to "mountain" and therefore is a common suffix of place names 
in Germany, like others:
-burg like in Hamburg, Brandenburg, Warburg, Rothenburg and many more 
(=castle)
-dorf like in Ossendorf, Düsseldorf, ... (= village)
-weiler like in Gartzweiler (= don't know the english word currently, 
but smaller than a village)
and others.

There are more name parts for place names, some of them are ambiguous 
and may be part of other features (like -hügel (=hill), -berg (=mountain 
- see Wittenberg ;)), -au (a kind of landscape around rivers, but like 
in Lichtenau suffix of town/citynames too), -tal (valley) and more; but 
for some like the ones above, it's very clear, that these are place names.

Therefore in German it's combined with city of... only in the relatively 
rare cases of ambiguous names - given the concrete context, not the name 
alone.

regards
Peter