[Tagging] Tagging of Country Names

Michael Tsang miklcct at gmail.com
Wed Oct 26 15:36:49 UTC 2016


On Tuesday 25 October 2016 17:02:05 Sven Geggus wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> in our localized German map style we try to render Country names in German
> with local name in parenthesis.
> 
> This works fine for a lot of countries. An example would be Thailand:
> Thailand (ประเทศไทย)
> 
> or (more readable for westerners) France:
> Frankreich (France)
> 
> Unfortunately there are some countries where this will not work:
> 
> Ägypten (Egypt مصر)
> 
> So this is where the tagging discussion starts.
> 
> I consider this a bad example of tagging for the renderer.
> 
> English is not an official language of Egypt thus the string "Egypt" is
> simply invalid in the countries name tag.
> 
> What I consider valid would be the countires name in all of its official
> langages.
> 
> Thus the right one would be:
> Ägypten (مصر)
> 
> So I propose a correction of all country names to names into official
> langages of the respective countries only and to remove all english names.

I believe that country names, as with all place names, should be tagged with 
the primary / official / most commonly used language on the ground, according to 
the customs of that particular country. If English is not officially / commonly 
used in that country, it should not appear on the main tag. For a multilingual 
community, the name tag should list the multilingual names, in the standard 
order of that country.

For example, the name tag for China should only be "中国" , which is Chinese, 
the only official language used country-wise. However, for Hong Kong and Macau, 
as both Chinese and English/Portuguese have equal official status, the name tag 
should be tagged bilingual as "香港 Hong Kong" and "澳門 Macau" respectively. 

Michael
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