[OSM-talk] Transcription and "internationalization" in place names

[Miloš Komarčević]

Hi all,

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 11:01 AM, Daniel Kastl <daniel at georepublic.de> wrote:
> name:ja_rm is probably what will not be rendered usually, but this would be
> the name written for example on street signs as name in latin characters.
> name:ja_kana is what was mentioned in a previous email, because it helps
> Japanese people to know the reading of a name. It's also useful for
> geocoding.
>

I would also like to take this opportunity to draw your attention to
the lack of unification on how 'romanized' language tags are used and
constructed for languages not usually written in Latin script.

'ja_rm' and 'zh_pinyin' are some examples

We strongly believe OSM should get behind and use BCP 47 as
recommended by W3C, Unicode, ECMA, etc.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag

and are already committed to retagging all our data in Serbia to 'sr'
and 'sr-Latn'.

Here is good historical article describing the rationale (note that
RFC 3066 is superseded by 5646):

http://icu-project.org/repos/icu/icuhtml/trunk/design/language_code_issues.html

Regards,
M