[OSM-talk] street names on several languages

[Dave Stubbs]

On 01/10/2007, Tapio Sokura <oh2kku at iki.fi> wrote:
> Dave Stubbs wrote:
> > For an example go see the node for London
> > (http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.4/node/107775)
> > It has:
> > name=London   (the default English)
> > name:fr=Londres   (French)
> > name:cy=Llundain   (Welsh)
>
> Some might even say that a complete version of that tagging would also
> include "name:en=London", because nothing is explicitly defining what
> language the default name is on. At least not until we figure out how to
> tag defaults based on an area. You can always guess, but computers are
> quite bad at guessing things.

Yeah, missing out the :en works fine as long as you only have one
language preference, ie: give me the English, and then fall back to
the default. But it does break somewhat if you have a list of
languages, ie: give me Welsh, then English, then French, before
falling back to the default.

Maybe a language:name=en tag -- just to avoid the redundancy of adding
the name twice, with all the update inconsistencies that could result
in. Or just keep cut'n'pasting.

>
> About the two letter language codes, should we think about moving on to
> ISO 639-2 or -3 three letter language codes? Because the 639-1 list
> doesn't cover the languages spoken in the world that well, especially
> closely related and smaller ones.
>

If you stick enough of them in the database, by the time anyone
develops useful applications for these tags they might feel the need
to add support ;-)

For those languages where there is a 2-letter code, there isn't much
harm in using them -- they don't actually prevent the 3-letter codes
being used.