[Tagging] "Feature Proposal - RFC - Qanat"

[Christoph Hormann]

> loan words.  Qanat IS a word that appears in English dictionaries and it IS
> the British English name for such structures.

That might be the case here - but only because English speakers have started communicating about this kind of thing using that term quite a long time ago.  This is not the case for elements of the geography outside of English speaking countries that English speakers have no broad awareness of (of which there are plenty).

> We should definitely map things that do not physically occur in
> English-speaking parts of the world.  But we should use the British English
> name (which may or may not have been derived from the local name) to tag
> them.

That would mean giving up on the goal of creating the best map of the world through collection of local knowledge of the geography and replacing it with the goal of creating a map of the world as it is perceived my English speakers.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
Imagico.de Geovisualisierungen
http://services.imagico.de