[Talk-GB] The Welsh for "Brighton"

[Andy Townsend]

On 12/06/2021 00:54, Jbrsk B wrote:
> The way bounding Brighton (341820414) is tagged name:cy =Trellachar
>
> Using Microsoft Translator I found that Tre=town and llachar=bright,
> but I can find no other example of Trellachar on the internet. Has
> Trellachar been invented by the very person who tagged it, and if so
> would that be valid or useful?
>
> According to wikipedia, "Brighton" (officially "Brighthelmstone" prior
> to 1810) doesn't mean "Bright town" but probably "the homestead of
> Beorthelm" or possibly "stony valley".
>
> I'm just curious what people think about this!

Thanks for spotting that - that does indeed look wrong.  It isn't useful 
to pretend that words translate between languages like this (clearly 
Paris in English is not something like "On the same level as equality").

The person who made the change's last edit was a year ago, and while 
they were editing a number of people asked them about the source of 
their names:

http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments?uid=11034976

There was just the one reply in there, and many of the names were 
restored.  It looks like Brighton was missed (probably because people 
fixed things that they saw that were definitely wrong, rather than 
looking for other potential errors as well).  It is possible to search 
for the others though - an overpass query looking for "name:cy" on 
things last edited by them at a point just after they stopped editing is:

http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/18hj

I'd suggest that everything on that list needs checking.  To look at one 
object in detail, let's pick Durham as an example. Click through from 
the overpass query to OSM to https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/21181736 
and look at the history of that by using the node number in 
http://osm.mapki.com/history/node.php?id=21181736 (replace "node" there 
with "relation" if looking at a relation).

That name was added in a changeset by this user 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/84123880 with the unhelpful 
comment "update" (i.e. no info about the actual source).  I've removed 
the Durham name in http://osm.org/browse/changeset/106247242 because I 
can't see a valid source for that name*.

For background, there's a bit of "when a name might be valid" 
information in 
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritoriesInformation.pdf 
(although there isn't really a "dispute" here).  Generally speaking if a 
name is used "on the ground" it's OK to include it, but it's not OK to 
just add "translations" into each of Ethnologue's 7000+ languages for 
everything with a name in OSM just because you can.

In the example of Durham I'm sure that it'll be big enough to have a 
valid name:cy (which might just be "Durham", according to 
cy.wikipedia.org) - and I'm sure that someone more knowledgeable than me 
could add it, based on an appropriate source (which can of course be 
"local_knowledge".

Best Regards,

Andy

* Wikipedia (which we can't use as a source because the licence isn't 
compatible) has at https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durham a suggestion of 
that name as an alternative one (as "Caerweir", see 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquial_Welsh_morphology#Initial_consonant_mutation 
for why the difference), via a Welsh-English dictionary 
https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiriadur_yr_Academi . Unfortunately 
without licence information for that dictionary we can't use that either.