[Tagging] "Feature Proposal - RFC - Qanat"

Paul Allen pla16021 at gmail.com
Sat Jun 20 13:46:15 UTC 2020


Grrrr.  The keyboard on this laptop is annoying.  To finish an unfinished
message...

On Sat, 20 Jun 2020 at 14:40, Paul Allen <pla16021 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Jun 2020 at 14:31, Christoph Hormann <osm at imagico.de> wrote:
>
>> > 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).
>>
>
> Yeah, but Britain imposed its imperial colonialism upon much of the world,
> so
> we've been using local words for a lot of geographical features for a long
> time.
>
> As for terms we don't already know, the tendency in English would be to
> adopt
> the local word if we found a need to refer to it.
>
> A bigger problem, I think, is a tendency
>

... for us to force round pegs into square holes.  It's not just that the
locals
give it a different name, it is actually different.  Like insisting that a
qanat is
just an underground canal.

> 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.
>>
>
Erm, nope, I didn't say that.  I said that if British English has a name
for something
then we should use it.  I didn't say that we should force square pegs into
round holes.  To me it isn't whether it's called a qanat or an
Undergroundwatertransfersystemfedfromawellandwithverticalmaintenanceshafts
(as it might be named in some languages) but what it actually is.  A qanat
is
more than just an underground canal whatever we call it, and deserves to be
tagged differently.

-- 
Paul
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