[OSM-talk] Explicit tagging of name language

[john at jfeldredge.com]

There are likely to be cases where two or more of the possible languages use an identical name for the same location or entity.  Plus, in addition to any official languages for a particular country, you may have additional languages spoken by the local people.  For example, the official language of France is French, but it has 24 regional languages in the European region of the country, and 51 additional regional languages in overseas territories, according to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_France>.  Trying to decide, on a location basis, which language a name=xxx tag belongs to won't be trivial.

-------Original Email-------
Subject :Re: [OSM-talk] Explicit tagging of name language
From  :mailto:kairo at kairo.at
Date  :Mon Dec 06 09:50:25 America/Chicago 2010


Frederik Ramm schrieb:
> Erik,
>
> On 12/06/10 11:19, Erik Johansson wrote:
>> :-) Well does anyone have code to add name as "local language" in
>> postgis, what are the options? Lets not complicate your remark by
>> enumerating all multilingual areas in the world, where names means
>> power
>
> The question was about Nominatim originally. As far as I am aware,
> Nominatim already makes an effort to find out in which country something
> lies (so it can give the country in the result list) - so it should be
> trivial to employ a country->language code mapping and always assume
> that the given name is in the country's default language, no?

With some countries having up to 11 or so official languages (ever 
looked at South Africa?), I'm not sure that's so trivial.
Or would you able to tell me what language a name in Switzerland is in 
on a pure-logical basis (Switzerland has German, French, Italian, and 
Romansh/Rhaeto-Romanic that are all official languages)? Of course, a 
human can potentially take a good guess based on some knowledge of the 
languages, but machines have a hard time there...

Robert Kaiser





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John F. Eldredge -- john at jfeldredge.com
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