[Talk-ko] Naming conventions in Korea

[Andrew Errington]

On Tue, 14 Oct 2014 20:19:09 Brian McLaughlin wrote:
> I would like to suggest the use of hyphens in the Romanized name to
> emphasize the place or feature type. See examples below. This is already in
> common use on many signs put up by the Korean government. This makes the
> usually long Romanized names easier to read, and what type of feature it is
> easier to understand for the map reader especially those not able to read
> Hangul.
> 
> Gangwon-do
> Jiri-san
> Sindorim-dong
> Yeoui-daero
> Jayur-ro
> 
> Also, drop the parentheses. I don't see them as being useful.

Most of the Romanised names do have hypens, but it depends on whatever is on 
the sign.  I have seen some inconsistency across the country, despite the 
signmaking being a national programme.  I actually found a guide to 
Romanisation of Korean signs.  I'll see if I can find it again (it was quite a 
large PDF file so I may have deleted my copy).

The parentheses will be dropped as a side effect of not including name:en in 
the name=* field.  They were useful as they clearly demarcate the English 
label, and they are consistent with the Japanese style (which is the source of 
the original "name:ko (name:en)" convention).  Some renderers also relied on 
their presence so that they could extract the two parts of the name=* field.  
That broke when the parentheses were deleted from some labels.

Best wishes,

Andrew