Re: [OSM-talk] Call to Take Action and Confront Systemic Offensive Behavior in the OSM Community
Hello, I can read at the date of this mail (how can you sign a moving text ??) : «Power dynamics in OSM are controlled by a dominant contributor profile: white, Western and male. This power dynamic has led to a communication style which includes misogynistic, hostile, targeting, doxing, unfriendly, competitive, intimidating, patronising messaging, which is offensive to us and forces many of us to remain as observers and without the confidence to participate actively.» I'm bored of reading hate speech against groups of people defined by their color skin, origin or gender. Er… Please read this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_racism This call is not a hate speech against white-people. It’s a call to recognise the issue and respond to it. Regards, Martin Constantino–Bodin. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] river - stream
then why is the picture on top of the bridge when bridge is added. Hi, Do you have an example (way number or position) so we can investigate the issue? Regards, Martin. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [Tagging] Tagging the local language
Thank you for this message! You are completely right. I meant relatively simple in the sense that there are two “obvious” languages to which a large majority of the region’s speakers minimally relate to. But you are completely right that it is already an oversimplification! I do understand that a surface that big couldn’t be as simple as that ☺ So it was definitely a bad example. Sorry about that. And I think that you made a very good point here: there is no point arguing for a best solution, as there will reasonnably be no such thing, only compromises. I believe that the proposal from Joseph Eisenberg ( https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Default_Language_Format ) and Mario Frasca (having several “label:language” nodes) are doing steps in very good directions. But they won’t solve all of the issues raised in this thread. Regards, Martin. P.S.: You include Easter Island in South America. Interesting. I know that it is part of Chile, but as it is part of an island relatively far away from the mainland, I wouldn’t have associated it with the continent. I’m probably wrong, I guess. But yeah, the notion of continent is definitely too fuzzy :-\ I fully agree. I was only taking the example of South America because its language community is relatively simple given the size of its area ☺ But I agree that it’s probably not something that we should actually map. Sorry about that: it wasn’t clear in my message. I don't usually post here to "throw rocks," but I must say that the language communities in South America are QUITE diverse — anything but "relatively simple." In addition to the five European languages of Portuguese (#1), Spanish, English, French and Dutch, there are dozens of indigenous languages (Quechua, with about 9 million speakers, Guarani, Aymara, another 7 or 8 million there...) that span the continent. Additionally, significant numbers are found of speakers of Italian, German, Arabic, Welsh, Coratian, Greek, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Romani and some clusters of Japanese, Hindustani, Javanese and Rapa Nui and Maori on Easter Island. Just saying. This is not an easy situation. The United Nations has "six official languages," that's not ideal, either. Absolutely anything OSM does will be a compromise, but I agree that we should strive for the most appropriate access to a culturally-appropriate solution. Great results seldom come from anything less than serious effort. I encourage continuing work on this important continuing development of OSM. Good dialog here is certainly part of that. SteveA California ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [Tagging] Tagging the local language
I fully agree. I was only taking the example of South America because its language community is relatively simple given the size of its area ☺ But I agree that it’s probably not something that we should actually map. Sorry about that: it wasn’t clear in my message. About oceans, would you advise to not map them entirely, or to use tricks like the “place=neighbourhood” one (which is based on POIs rather than polygons)? It feels like both solutions could be problematical. Regards, Martin. The main problem with tagging continents is that there is no agreement on the number or definition. While most English-speakers identify 7 political continents, many people in Latin American call "America" one continent. Eurasia is often also treated as one continent, leading to 5 continents (with Africa, Australia and Antarctica). Geographically, Africa is connected to Asia, with only the artificial Suez Canal as a barrier, so 4 continents is also logical. Naming and dividing the oceans leads to similar issues. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] mapping outside Europe
apart from the issue "international objects receive a tag 'name' with an English value", there are other ways in which you see how we're letting USA-UK patronize the rest. the latest example in my experience would be the 'sac_scale' tagging. it comes from the SAC-CAS classification, of the Schweizer Alpen-Club/Club Alpino Svizzero/Club Alpin Suisse/Club Alpin Svizzer, yet OSM held the discussion in English, and it not only chose `sac_scale` for the tag name, it also decided not to use the Swiss codes T1..T6 (language independent), but the English version of the human readable explanation for the codes: T1 (hiking/escursione/randonnée/Wandern) .. T6 (difficult alpine hiking/escursione alpina difficile/randonnée alpine difficile/schwieriges Alpinwandern). a more important issue (I would call it "mapping outside Europe", hence the subject) is for me each and every (photo)graphic explanation of the tagging values. take `highway` (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway). text are fine, really, but the associated pictures seem all taken in Europe, or North America, they have more chances to confuse the mapper based in Africa or South America, than helping them. in Panama many roads are classified as 'camino de verano', they look like highway:track, but are really highway:unclassified with an extra indication for the months where they are expected to be passable. maybe can be solved in the wiki by changing the link to the picture into a link to several pictures, but I'm afraid that we need to address this in the standard renderer as well: users also expect some of the information to be reflected in the rendering, explaining why so many mappers still use highway:track despite one repeating "don't map for the renderer". in Morocco (and I guess elsewhere too) we have small towns with undeveloped areas, crossed by paths with residential function, or large cities with extremely narrow alleys, again with residential function. these have been solved by different mappers in different ways, leading to very inconsistent mapping, in particular where there isn't a local, assertive, mappers' community. (Morocco and Panama are two such cases, Colombia is much better in this aspect.) Wow. That’s quite impressive examples. I fully agree that this Europe-centrism might lead to issues in the future. I remembered being quite confused when I first read the documentation for crossing ways, as they are all following UK’s naming system (which I’ve never heard before). They are well-documented, so I guess that it’s fine. But I understand what you mean: the “name” tag issue may not be the most relevant in this family of issues. This might indicate that the people discussing in this mailing list are from a very specific background, possibly caused by the language of the mailing list itself. At the same time, I have to admit that I don’t feel like there are that much pictures on the documentation. I was for instance surprised that there was no picture for the “minimap” tag in the wiki (I fixed this in the meantime ☺). So it might be something that we can easily improve step by step ☺ I’m not sure what to conclude here. I guess that being conscious of the Europe-centrism issue during discussions might help? Or that we may need to look for volunteers to complete the OSM wiki with additional pictures from non-Europe/North America? I will look at the pictures I took back to been I lived in Chile and Brazil… but as I wasn’t into OSM then, I won’t have much useful Regards, Martin. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [Tagging] Tagging the local language
(By the way, I really appreciate the arguments that are given in this thread: we’re doing good work here! ☺) So, it seems that we can’t really make these changes to the OSM database because there are technical issues in the OSM renderrers to be solved first. In particular, it is currently very difficult to know what is the local language(s) to be used in a given area in a map, and we thus heavily rely on the “name” tag to display names on the map. From what you said, you seem very fine with the suggestion to remove the “name” tag in regions with no main local language, as soon as there is some way to infer the local languages. Please tell me if I’ve misunderstand you on this part ☺ If so, we are “only” left with the issue of agreeing with a way to map this information, and update the main renderrers. (Both are huge tasks, I’m fully aware of that ) The proposal that Joseph Eisenberg linked ( https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Default_Language_Format ) is very interesting. From what I saw, it seems that it was rejected for two reasons: first because linguistic regions are fuzzy and thus hard to map, and second because it wasn’t very clear what to do if there are more than one language (I mean, it does states that we can separate language codes by semicolons, just that some people in the votes seem not to know what to render from it if too many languages are listed). It seems to me that these are actually very close to the issues that we discussed in this thread: we are in a good direction ☺ Mario Frasca noted that the areas that we are discussing (Antarctica, Seas, etc.) are actually all regions, not POIs! I completely missed that before. So we could definitely choose to put multiple labels, and we can even choose to place them next to the corresponding linguistic area. This is a cool idea ☺ one reason for mentioning Morocco: it shows how three names is perceived as too many. the impact on South America could be to name it in Spanish and Portuguese (two languages), and by this we would cover more than 99% of the people living there. North America would need Spanish, English and French, so maybe that would be one language too many. Maybe we can sometimes factorise? Like “América del Sur / do Sul” for South America. (Technically, France is partly in South America too, but I guess that it is completely fine to forget about it in the same way that we can forget about Pomerode when naming the continent because, as you said, Spanish and Portuguese covers 99 % of the population.) (interesting page, that about "Imperialisme linguistique". the Dutch version of it, very short, mentions Morocco for the other reason I mentioned it myself: the country has experienced French and Arabic cultural imperialism, and is now trying to implement some respect for the majority of their (Amazigh) people. taken to this context, this would be the OSM-people who do not read nor write to this list. mind you, the list is called 'talk', not 'talk:en'.) Indeed, that’s a very good point. And I guess that most OSM mappers are actually not following this list. I’m not sure what we can do about that here :-\ Interlingua/Lingua Franca would be a nice compromise, at least for South America and the seas next to Spain, France, and Italy, where more than three languages are recognized and even more spoken, but all are neo-latin. I don't know whether anything like this could apply to the Baltic, or to other seas. The advantage of Interlingua is that it has been designed to be understandable without having to learn the language by a large part of the European community. It indeed may be a good choice for an international map (in the places where there is no obvious local language). However, it feels like this should be a choice left to the renderrer, not the OSM database. That’s why I would be in favor of any additional tag as you suggested above. About the Baltic Sea, maybe the Interslavic language and its children (Slovianto, Neoslavonic) would be possible candidates? It will be difficult to choose anyway, as the Finnish language has very different origin than the other languages spoken in the region. That’s in general why I don’t think that there should be only one language… but as people considers that more than two languages is too much on the map, some choice will have to be made. anyhow, leaving implementations aside, I think that a bit more language-culture agnosticism would not harm OSM. I fully agree ☺ And I think that this would be a great value for the OSM community over the world. Regards, Martin. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [Tagging] nomoj de internaciaj objektoj / nazwy obiektów międzynarodowych / names of international objects
Baltic Sea to be the "Baltic Sea" or for South America to be "South America" - this is an example of English imperialism. This "imperialism" idea of yours is just your idea. It is not something that is widely felt. regarding imperialism, I think it’s hard to reject the reasoning that English is in widespread use because of imperialism. Yes, but using it for a pragmatic reasons for an international communication is usually not imperialism. I am also not a fan of blaming history for the current situation and taking the long road because you don't like that history. It would mean that I couldn't speak dutch with my Surinam friends just because 400 years ago the ideas of how we should conduct ourselves were different. That is just counterproductive. Indeed. But it should be taken with some care. In particular there is a huge difference between using English as a vehicular language, and using US or UK base culture references. A simple example of this is the imperial system: it is currently in use in very few countries (and even here in the UK, it has mostly been replaced by metric measures everywhere). Yet, you will see a lot of people using these depreciated units just because they think that it comes with the English package. This is very sad for me. Another think to keep in mind is that English is a difficult language. There is a scientific consensus in this, and yet a lot of people seems to deny this based on bare opinion (usually held people speaking less than three languages…). Thus, is it extremely important, in the sake of equality, that when a native is discussing with a non-native with difficulties speaking or understanding, that the native avoid unusual words, idioms, etc. Doing otherwise would be a very effective way to make the non-native feel stupid, or to just not listen to him/her because “he/she doesn’t understand”… which is just a perfect illustration of the consequences of imperialism. One of the base of the Esperanto movement, but also the simple/basic English Wikipedia project, was precisely to fight against these inequalities caused by the difficulty of the French and English languages in a constructive way. (It’s not the only goals of these movements.) In short, indeed there has been a lot of past imperialism, but these kind of things can be insidious and still continue. I really don’t think that we want to unconsciously impose such culture in our community. This is why I believe that we should be very careful with people trying to impose an English name for the “name” tag in places where it is absolutely not fit (see https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/424311641/history for a sad example). Or state that this mailing list is English-only knowing that someone subscribing to it is not warned about it beforehand. Regards, Martin. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [Tagging] nomoj de internaciaj objektoj / nazwy obiektów międzynarodowych / names of international objects
Hi everyone ☺ OK, it seems that the discussions are going wild again in this new year. So let’s keep feelings aside and try to answer with arguments instead ☺ Thanks everyone who does that, you are too many to thank individually ☺ @Mario: I’ve seen a lot of people saying that we shouldn’t remove the “name” tag (and because it already led to a misunderstanding, let’s be precise: I mean the tag whose name is exactly “name”, so we keep the “name:en”, “name:UN:en”, etc., and I only mean that for places like oceans and Antartica), but I haven’t seen any argument for this. Can you elaborate on this? The reason why I believe the “name” tag should not be placed in such place is semantic: there is no best local name, so let’s not put any. This then enables any renderrer to default to a language of their choice (or to check for other, possibly more adequate tags, like “name:UN:*”). If you put a “name” tag here, I can’t do that. I’ve been suggesting to create a renderrer that just uses “name:eo” if present… just to be told right away that this is not a good solution as it would basically chooses the Esperanto name for everything instead of just these places where there is no default language. I think that having an empty “name” tag or not having a “name” tag would be a nice indication that there is not best “name” tag, and leave each renderrer use their heuristics (or just display no name). You mentioned the cities in Morocco. This is a cool example ☺ So for instance there is this node: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/288704798 (I’ve taken it randomly: I really don’t know this region) It seems to be in a very similar situation than the Baltic Sea we discussed before https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/305640277 So if we can do it in Morocco, would it make sense to do it in the Baltic Sea? (That was basically what this changeset suggested: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/78171743 just that this changeset wasn’t done with the permission of the community.) I like how it renders with the new line between each name ☺ The only difference is that the Baltic Sea involves a couple more languages. Any thoughts about this? @Marc: You seem to understand the issue better than me, but I didn’t understand your answer. From what you said, the osm.org styles base themselves on the “name” tag to determine the default style? Or is this that the way the styles are currently defined do not enable the definition of heuristics to pick the best “name:*” tag if the “name” tag itself is absent? I really don’t know the styling part of OSM renderrers, but it seems to be crucial in this discussion: can you elaborate on this? This would really help ☺ Thanks in advance! ☺ (Here follows the second part, more clumsy and probably less important part of my message ☺) Just to argument against some opinions that have been raised there which made my right eyebrow raised by two centimeters: — Yes, linguistic imperialism is a thing: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imp%C3%A9rialisme_linguistique#Les_facettes_de_l'imp%C3%A9rialisme_linguistique_dans_les_grandes_r%C3%A9gions_du_monde The English Wikipedia for this notion is quite poor, so I’m putting the French one. Interestingly enough its discussion page is going as wild as this very thread ☺ — There have been a German-only message three days ago, and it didn’t yield to any frenzy, yet, in this thread, people seems to really don’t like multilanguage posts. The rules of this mailing list are not shown when subscribing, so it is normal that not everyone knows about them. So let’s be calm about it. (And maybe display some rule when subscribing the mailing list?) ☺ — From what I remember, there is no South-America polygon in OSM. And given that about half its population speaks Portuguese as a main language (yes, Brazil is a big country), choosing Spanish for the name tag may not be as natural as it might look like. — Esperanto is not meant to be more easily understandable without learning the language. There are languages with such goals (Interlingua, typically). The goal of (the design behind) Esperanto (before it started to evolve like a natural language) is to reduce the learning time to reach fluency without hindering on the language expressiveness. Amike, Martin. Hi Tomek, and everybody. being this an English list, I'll write in English, I'm tempted to use Spanish, or Italian. my written Latin is poor. I'm sorry to disappoint you as an Esperanto fan, but I understand Polish better than Esperanto. Should I "vote" on your proposal? I consider this the wrong place for holding even the discussion. according to me, using the English language for naming "South America" in the standard map is bad enough, but I do not think (many) people from South America will tell you that **here**, because people who agree with you will not be reading you here. If I know the locals good enough, they would want the map to be in
Re: [OSM-talk] nomoj de internaciaj objektoj / nazwy obiektów międzynarodowych ? names of international objects
I'd suggest using the 6 main United Nations languages for the "name=*" tag of Oceans and Continents: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. That would be very nice, actually. Although a bit redundant, as this information is already present in the six “name:UN:” tags. But there is no perfect solution, and as mentioned, most database users will want to pick a localized name of the form "name:=" so these tags should be added. I’m sorry, but I still have issues understanding why it would be so harmless… just to remove the “name” tag (in the case where there is no main local language). No information would be lost as all the “name:” (and its variants) would be still there. It would be up to the renderrer to have to make a choice. It looks much less ad hoc to me: OSM is before all the database, not its renderrers. (Again, amongst OSM’s principles, I believe that there is a “semantic first, not renderring” one.) I would understand if there would have been some well-used renderrers that assume a “name” tag for large objects, but it doesn’t seem to be the case from this discussion. Adding a “name” tag to a place with no local name seems artificial, and as you have seen, raises quite a lot of tensions because it implicitly imposes the assumption that there should be one main language… and this assumption seems so far away from the principles of OSM. As Oleksiy Muzalyev said it very nicely: “Translation is becoming the true international language”. By the way, I’ve seen quite unusual changesets related to this issue. I’m linking some here, as I think that it illustrates the issues of the discussion in a more concrete matter: There is an edit war here: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/424311641/history Basically, there are some people insisting that the “name” tag of the Maldives be in English instead of the local name “ދިވެހިރާއްޖެ”. This is very strange to me: in this case there is a clear local language, but some people still insist in having it in English. English is locally recognised, but it is not the official language. I’m sorry, but it’s difficult not to see that as English imperialism: people wanting to impose English locally without any reason. I furthermore notice that changeset relative to Esperanto are prompt to trigger ban policies, but English-related not that much: there seems to be an asymmetry here which doesn’t feel like the values of OSM. Speaking of which, some reverts are done in the name of “Esperanto vandalism” while the situation is more complex than this. For instance, this revert: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/77883111 The initial changeset didn’t updated “name” tags from English to Esperanto, it just removed them, and added localised notes “:eo”. These additional tags has been removed because of the revert. I fully understand that one shouldn’t remove the “name” tag until we have set up this discussion here, but with such as revert description, it seems as if the main issue of the original commit was to add localised tags Oo Please don’t use such changeset description unless the original changeset really did just update a bunch of “name” tags to Esperanto for no apparent reason. Anyway, as Pierre Béland yesterday evening said it very well: let’s be positive, the new year is coming ☺ Cheers, Martin. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Relevance of the “name” tag in places where there is no obvious associated language
I personally am not a fan of using 8 different names in one name tag (though some countries that have multiple equal languages do favour that nationally). The example here "Baltijas jūra / Baltijos jūra / Itämeri / Läänemeri / Morze Bałtyckie / Östersjön / Østersøen / Ostsee / Балтийское море" seems a bit clumsy. As a side question: how many places are actually affected by this, in an order of magnitude? I would expect most seas and oceans, some englobing territories like continents (although we discussed before that continents doesn’t make much sense in OSM), multilingual political entities (Europe, Mercosul, etc.), and I guess stateless Islands (typically around Antarctica). I guess it’s more than an hundred, but is it much more than a thousand? The reason I’m asking is that there may actually be a relatively reasonable number of tiles affected by the issue. I understand that it would be quite a heavy technical challenge to have to deal with several versions of similar tiles, but at least it may actually not take that much additional space. (Also, it might put things into perspective to have an idea of how many places we are discussing here ☺) Regards, Martin. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Relevance of the “name” tag in places where there is no obvious associated language
You understand correctly. And yes, you can guess a users language from either http headers or geolocation or even a cookie. But the issue there currently is, is that there is one Mapnik map with the captions rendered in the tiles. To do something about that you would need to make a different caption layer and present the one you think is right for the user viewing the map as an overlay over a non-captioned Mapnik map. Or you have to make different Mapnik styles for different languages and present them also based on those criterea. Or, as I suggested before: make your own map. The german community has one with a different style and lots of placed rendered in German and English. A problem with that is that it takes much more time and storage to make those tiles. I know google does something like it but does it IMHO in a bad way because for me it translates every place into a Dutch name, giving rise to oddities as Ariën-aan-de-Leie. So if you want to go that way, expect it to be less than trivial. I understand the issue. It’s frustrating because it is a technical issue of the renderer, not of the database: it seems to conflict with the “semantic first, not renderring” OSM principle. 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. And I would be violently against removing name tags for such places. Oleksiy Muzalyev makes a great point why you should not remove name tags from places. It makes them unfindable. You can not find something which is not in the OSM database. Having them rendered in an unwanted language seems to me to be much more desirable than not being able to find them at all. I’m sorry, I failed to find Oleksiy Muzalyev’s message: what was the sent time of this message? I’m very surprised by this comment, because OSM search also includes the localised names in its search. Here is a random example: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=中国 and https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Ĉinio both find China ( https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/270056 ) as unique result. This means that the base search in https://www.openstreetmap.org not also searches for the “name” tag, but also for the “name:zh”, “name:eo”, etc. tags (it also looks for the “official_name” tags too: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=中华人民共和国 ). Or are you referring to another search engine? Maybe you misunderstood me: when I say “removing the “name” tag”, I mean removing the only tag whose name is strictly “name”. In particular, I’m of course not suggesting to also the “name:en”, “name:eo”, etc. tags. This would of course be silly as it would remove the information from OSM: it’s not what I’m advocating here. I’m just suggesting to remove the “name” tag, not its localised versions. This does not remove any information as the “name” tag is usually identical to one of its localised version: in the case of https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/270056 , the “name” and “name:zh” are identical. Regards, Martin. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Relevance of the “name” tag in places where there is no obvious associated language
(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
[OSM-talk] Relevance of the “name” tag in places where there is no obvious associated language
Interesting. I sent a message two days ago with a very similar topic, but it hasn’t yet found a moderator to accept it (or reject it). I’m sending it again here, maybe it can help with the discussion. Regards, Martin. Hi, Some context first. So there has been this changeset that triggered some discussions: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/77845837 Changeset comments in not a great place for discussion, so I suggest that we continue here. (Thanks @SomeoneElse for the link! ☺) First, here is what is not an issue: the language-specific “name” tags (“name:en”, “name:de”, etc.), and the “name” tags where there is a clear default language (because the place uses a particular language, because it is in a place using this particular language, etc.). The issue comes in places where there is not a particular language, like oceans, most seas, or places like Antartica. In most of these places, the “name” tag is actually using the English name. The issue is that English, despite being a de facto internal language, is felt by some communities as a non-neutral choice, given all the inequalities it yields among people in the world, given its complexity, etc. The Esperanto community is particularly criticising the choice of the English language as an international language. I don’t think that anyone wants to fight about whether English is neutral here: this is not my question. I’m writing this message in English as the title of this mailing list displays in English, but I’m willing to rephrase the question in Esperanto. The question I would like to ask is about the relevance of having a “name” tag in places where there is no default language—knowing that all the “name:en”, “name:eo”, etc. are already there. I can imagine that some renderers might expect to always be a tag “name”, and I wonder how fixable this is (especially in the cases where there is a localised name). If you have any argumented pointer about this, I would be interested. As far as I know, the wiki doesn’t state anything about English being the default language for the name tag: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names It thus doesn’t feel like this question has already been discussed. However, I never participated in the main OSM mailing list and thus missed any such discussions if they already took place. If so, please give me an argumented link. I tried to formulate the question to avoid having to fight over English vs Esperanto or any debate like that. Please do not fight because of this message: I know how harmful such debates can be ☹ Regards, Martin. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
