[OSM-talk] Explicit tagging of name language

[Ed Avis]

Frederik Ramm <frederik <at> remote.org> writes:

>>Given that, and the user's preferred languages [en, fr], what name should be
>>picked?  The program cannot know that the name 'Scotland' is in English
>
>Why? Are there places in Scotland that have a Gaelic name in the "name" 
>tag?

There may be, but in the absence of other information, how would you write a
program to work out that name=Scotland must be in English and not some other
language?

We could add per-country or per-geographical-area rules about what the 'default'
language is.  But that seems like the wrong answer, and would give the wrong
result in many cases.  Often, there is no sharp dividing line between one
language area and another, so we do need to tag the language used at the level of
individual objects, and not as a set of defaults.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>