On Thursday 28 May 2015, Andrew Guertin wrote: > > There is a fundamental difference between "an actual name for a > > place" and "a translation of one of those names" > > I DO agree with this statement[1]. > > However, I think that the point at which a word stops being a > transliteration and starts being a native word is much sooner than > you seem to. I'm not a linguist, but if I had to pin down when I > think a word becomes part of a language, I'd say whenever the person > using it doesn't think they're code-switching.[2] > > It's clear that in many cases, the people writing "Абергавенни" don't > consider themselves to ever be switching out of Russian. To me, that > makes Абергавенни an actual name for the place.
That might be the case but for OSM what matters should be if the use of this reference is sufficiently widespread, specific and prominent to be verifiable for mappers. If i use a certain 'name' to refer to a certain geographic feature this is not yet a name of that feature in any wider sense no matter how i generated this name. When i start communicating that name by refering to this feature with that name to others and others pick up the name and use it themselves this changes. When this use of the name i chose gets widespread - both in absolute numbers, i.e. people actually using it frequently and in relative numbers, i.e. this name becomes the dominating name to refer to that feature within a certain context, like in a certain language, it will be sufficiently established to be tagged in OSM (in my opinion - others might see this differently). Note the key part here is the conscious and specific use of the name for the feature in question. Automatically generated lists and databases do not count. These might influence peoples' use of names but do not establish a name on their own. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
