On 04/08/2014 18:08, Philip Barnes wrote:
The big problem with transliteration to help pronunciation is where do you stop, Berlin for example has 194 name tags for different languages, 84 of which just say Berlin.
Which gets straight to the nub of the problem. Berlin does _not_ need a name:en of "Berlin" because it does _not_ have an English name that's different to its actual name.
Similarly, Bury St Edmunds(1) doesn't need a name:uk of Бері-Сент-Едмендс as whichever local mapper I checked with in #osm-gb(2) said that it doesn't have a distinct, verifiable, Ukrainian name (unlike for example Moscow (3) and London (4), which have several distinct names). "Бері-Сент-Едмендс" is a simple transliteration of the sound of the words "Bury St Edmunds" into Ukrainian (poorly, as it turns out, because the pronunciation of the second "u" is rendered as an "e" in the same way as the first (correctly) is).
To duplicate every name in OSM in every language (or even every alphabet) is clearly ridiculous - and the "but it's only for cities" argument is also not a good one, since what is done for cities will next be done for towns, villages, village shops, everything.
Cheers, Andy (1) http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/21409982/history (2) https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/20757217 (3) http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2555133 (4) http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/65606 _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
