[Tagging] Drain vs. ditch

[EthnicFood IsGreat]

> Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2019 17:12:33 -0800
> From: Michael Patrick <geodesy99 at gmail.com>
> To: tagging at openstreetmap.org
> Subject: Re: [Tagging] Drain vs ditch
> A survey of international and some national lexicons indicates that the two
> terms 'ditch' and 'drain' are equivalent used in the context of liquids
> from the smallest to largest scales.
>
> The term 'drain' however seems mostly to apply at the interface where the
> water transitions from the substrate ( soil ) to free running water, down
> flow from that the water is 'channeled' through ditches, fluves, shutes,
> spillways, canals, and a multitude of functional confinements. One of the
> earliest ( 1920 ) legal references to British and American law notes this
> equivalence, and the following an extract from a 2017 global standard
> saying basically the same thing.
>
[...]


> Local terminology takes precedence, at the highest level it is available.
>
> While a dictionary might be a useful start for determining a meaning, there
> is almost always some better source of definitions in a specific domain,
> culture, and region, and location. The U.N., E.U., U.K., Scotland, and down
> to Renfrewshire all have documentation of what terms mean in those local
> contexts, for example.
>
> Almost always, a single word will be immediately overloaded when used world
> wide.Human languages have compound words, adjectives, verbs and adverbs for
> a reason, and tagging schemes have equivalents.
>
> Michael Patrick
> Data Ferret


Michael, thank you for your extensive and instructive research.

Mark