[OSM-talk] OSM/LondonOSM | Re: Crimea situation - on the ground

[Yuri Astrakhan]

Thanks Rory, that's an interesting case.  One thing of note is grouping
names by language/dialect is fairly common but still arbitrary division --
i.e. it assumes that a group of people speaking one language/dialect have
no contradictions in naming something.  But just like we should not assume
language is the same as a location for wiki documentation, names could also
differ depending on location rather than name.

A case to the point:  Russian speakers from New York tend to say "in
Manhattan" (meaning -- in the city/borough of Manhattan), where as Russian
speakers from everywhere else tend to say "on Manhattan" (on an island of
Manhattan). I suspect this has cultural roots -- there was a popular song
with words "live on Manhattan" that recently made that expression popular
everywhere except for the Russian-speaking NYC populace.  Of course this is
not something we need to document in OSM, but it highlights that language
is not homogeneous with naming.... and just makes a fun story :)

On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 6:22 AM Rory McCann <rory at technomancy.org> wrote:

> On 07.02.20 20:22, Yuri Astrakhan wrote:
> > (e.g. two fairly large groups of people could refer to the same
> > place/object by different names). ... the map should be able to
> > reflect difference of opinions to some "reasonable" degree (an
> > intentionally vague term).
> One useful example of that is a city in the north west of the island of
> Ireland, called (in English) either Derry or Londonderry. Everyone
> agrees on the Irish name (`name:ga`) (󠀁󠁧󠁡Doire󠀁󠁿). OSM's
> multilingual tagging scheme, but for dialects, are used to differentiate
> the Hiberno-English (en_IE) name (󠀁󠁥󠁮󠀭󠁉󠁅Derry󠀁󠁿) from the
> British-English (en_GB) term (󠀁󠁥󠁮󠀭󠁇󠁂Londonderry󠀁󠁿). The `name`
> tag uses the commonly used compromise. That approach could work for
> other areas.
>
> RFC 1766 (for IETF language tags) appears to allow quite detailed
> specification of languages & areas, and could be useful.
>
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/267762522
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1766
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag
>
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