> 2010/11/3 "Marc Schütz" <[email protected]>: > >> > No, this is _not_ the purpose of loc_name. In fact, > >> loc_name/name/old_name/official_name... and language tags are > completely orthogonal. > > > The "Examples" section of http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:name > describes their usage. loc_name would be the name a feature is known as by > the local population, in contrast to the official and nation wide names. > Unfortunately, the examples there are a bit contrived, but you get the general > idea. > > > I was assuming that the local population would speak the local dialect > (language). Of course this would not tell you which language/dialect > this is (without an external source or a polygon or sth. similar which > contains these), but it could be the right place to put the > information anyway.
And there could well be several local dialects and languages. > > > > If I were to present you with two samples of speech (be it written or > spoken) of which you don't know anything about (official status, where they > are spoken, ...), it would be impossible to determine whether they are > dialects or languages. > > > fortunately it is not the case that OSM presents you information > without at least (geo)-context. > > > > Of course, in practice, there is indeed a distinction, but it depends on > various external factors (Is the language recognized officially? Is it > used only in informal contexts? How do the speakers themselves see their > language? How is it related to other languages?), and thus it is not a > property > of the language itself. > > > There is also the distinction: does someone who speaks language A > understand A' or doesn't he. If he does A' could be defined as > dialect. I agree that this distinction is sometimes difficult, and > probably most of the German dialects won't be understood completely > but only in parts by someone who only speaks the "official language". > I think I agree that we might treat dialects just like any other > language. And to add to the confusion, there are actually two notions involved: - the distinction between two languages/dialects - and the distinction between a language and its sub-dialects (a hierarchy) But while all this is interesting, I think we already swayed too much from the topic. > > > > However, in our context, this distinction still doesn't matter. We have > various places each of which can have an official name, an international > name, a former name, etc. Each of these names can be in one or more > languages/dialects. If we were to restrict this to officially recognized > languages > only, we would still need another tagging scheme for the dialects. I don't > see what we'd gain from doing so. > > > Probably the coding could be done in a way that it became clear that > e.g. bavarian is part of the "german language family". AFAIK the ISO 639-6 standard is intended to do that: providing a means to refer to any language variant by specifying the "path" through the hierarchy, if there isn't a shorter code available. But I don't know its current status. > > > > Except of course if you're suggesting that we shouldn't record dialectal > names at all? I (and supposedly Stefan too) would object to that, because > there are useful applications for it. For example, I'd like to record field > names (Flurnamen), which usually exist only in dialectal form, and for > which I would see it as incorrect to use Standard German "translations". > > > not sure if they only exist in dialectical form (IMHO "translations" > would be feasible but won't insist on this), Well, they would be translations. My opinion is, that we should not invent translations, but only use what's really in use, but I guess others have different opinions on this question. > but me too I am > interested in collecting this cultural heritage in OSM. Still there is > a problem with how to write them, as dialects are usually (in Germany) > not written. AFAIK there is no "official" way to write them. The same > word would be written differently by different mappers. Yes. But maybe mappers from one area could agree on one "orthography" or at least a few basic rules. And if everything else fails, we could still fall back to using name:whatever-fonipa to record the phonemic (probably preferable to phonetic) form. > > > >> Your example of East Franconian is about a > >> dialect IMHO, not about a language. > > Yes, but then there is also Bavarian, which has the same official > recognition (i.e. none), and roughly the same social status, but there _is_ a > code for it. > > yes, as the world knows those bavarians try to be different wherever > they can. Don't know how they managed to put their dialect in, but I > guess keeping franconian out was part of their intervention ;-) Frei statt Bayern :-P Seriously, I guess this is an artifact of the usage of Ethnologue/SIL data for the ISO codes, which are rather bad quality for European dialects. -- GMX DSL Doppel-Flat ab 19,99 €/mtl.! Jetzt auch mit gratis Notebook-Flat! http://portal.gmx.net/de/go/dsl _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
