[OSM-talk] Relevance of the “name” tag in places where there is no obvious associated language

[Martin Constantino–Bodin]

(Long post. TL;DR: I’m presenting the Esperanto community and I am 
looking for instances where there is no default language involved around 
the renderer.)
> IMHO that is more a "he says, she says" argument than anything valid. 
> To me it comes more across that a small community wants to push its 
> own agenda.
> That may be unfair because I don't know how big the Esperanto 
> community is, so it is IMHO.
> I am biased. I don't know Esperanto. Therefore I would be against 
> rendering everything that is not nation-specific in Esperanto.

Maybe it would be helpful if I can quickly present the language and its 
community here. This is not meant to be exhaustive, but may help the 
discussions. I will try to be extra-short, but I’m not super good at 
that: if you want to skip it, just jump to the line starting with 
“Anyway, all that to say that”.

It is a small community (about 2 million speakers in 2005). It however 
is internationally recognised as a great community-driving community, as 
illustrated by its presence (through TEJO) in the United Nation as a key 
role to coordinate local actions towards vulnerable populations, 
particularly the ones that has linguistic issues and suffer from the 
overall forceful usage of the English language.

The main driving force of Esperanto is not its number of speakers, but 
its simplicity to learn (Piron, 1994 ; Flochon, 2000) compared to other 
languages and its propedeutical nature (that is, it helps learning other 
languages). As a rough estimate, studies suggest that it takes up to 10 
times less time to reach a fluent level in Esperanto than a fluent level 
in English for Europeans. Non-Europeans need indeed more time, but still 
much less time than to learn languages such as English or French. 
Furthermore, this simplicity of the language does not come with loss of 
expressivity: as a French native speaker and Esperanto speaker, I have 
huge trouble translating what I say in Esperanto to French, as French is 
missing some crucial notions in some contexts.

Most roots of Esperanto are from Roman and Slavic languages. However, in 
contrary to most languages, words in Esperanto are rarely just one root. 
The language is highly agglutinative and comes with a handy set of 
suffixes that enable to get a whole lexical field from a single root. 
For instance, “ĉevalo” means horse, “ĉevalino” means mare, “ĉevalido” 
means colt, “ĉevalisto” means horseman/groom, “ĉevalaro” means horse 
herd, etc. Of course, these suffixes apply for any other animal: “ŝafo” 
means sheep, and thus “ŝafino” is a ewe, “ŝafaro” is a “flock of sheep”, 
etc. So although the roots are indeed Europe-centric, it is not that 
large an issue as root importation has been restricted as much as 
possible: if a combination of other words lead to the same result, the 
root (usually) is not imported.

Probably the most important point: the goal of the Esperanto community 
is not to overcome English in some kind of epic battle. It is to provide 
language diversity and avoid language imperialism. Hence, the main point 
of the community is not that Esperanto should be used as the 
international language instead of English, it’s that there should not be 
one unique international language: Esperanto should be an international 
language, not the international language ☺ Anyway, the Esperanto 
movement is complex, and some parts of it just states that Esperanto 
should be used for pragmatical reasons as it costs much less to teach it 
than other languages (a good instance of this is 
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapport_Grin ).

That was relatively long, and a bit out of the context — sorry about 
that. I was hoping that it might help understand the goals of some 
OSM-esperantists here (and in my experience, it seems that actually many 
Esperantists use OSM compared to other communities! I may be biaised on 
that).

Anyway, all that to say that I don’t think that using Esperanto names 
for the “name” tags in places like oceans is a good idea: it doesn’t 
even meet the goals of Esperantists themselves (well, some, probably). 
😅​ That’s why I’m really in favor of just removing this tags in such 
places.

> Removing the name tag does not solve any problem. The renderer for the 
> map (or any program that needs to display the name tag) needs to make 
> a decision which tag to display. If the name tag is not present it 
> will have to fall back to another one.
> In cases where you are running a program on your computer, this 
> decision might be easy: the language setting of your computer (like 
> JOSM does). In cases where you make something for a general audience, 
> that decision will not be so easy. Then you will get into this 
> discussion about "what language is used most" or "we don't feel 
> comfortable having an in our eyes non-neutral language pushed up to us".

I agree that it does not entirely solve the problem. It however 
partially solves it: in most contexts, there is a default language 
defined. Be it the language of the computer (as you said for JOSM), of 
the browser (and, if we look at the HTTP_ACCEPT header, there might even 
be more than one!), or some rendering options. If one is printing a map, 
there is generally a context around (the language of the book, or the 
place—which is usually the same than the computer’s on which the map is 
being generated).

Maybe I’ve misunderstood have you mean by “general audience” here. I 
would greatly appreciate example where there is no available default 
language indirectly provided by the user (’s system) or context.

> The problem arises out of one of the general OSM principles: use the 
> name that is verifiable on the ground. This does not work well for 
> oceans or any international body. No ocean has a sign affixed to it 
> with its name (well, there might be signposts in different countries 
> pointing to it).

This is a great point. To me, it seems to point to removing the “name” 
tag on such places: this information doesn’t correspond to anything 
“real” (but the “name:en” does). And I don’t even mind if some careless 
renderers just use “name:en” as a default is the tag “name” is absent: 
it’s something that should be parametric, but a renderer might just have 
be designed specifically for English, so whatever.

In any case, it would be great to add the eventual result of this 
discussion on the wiki (be it as a footnote) in 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names ☺

Regards,
Martin.

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