How should we handle the naming of somewhat global objects like seas? Currently most of them have the name defaulted to English. Would it be possible to just not give them a default name? Or is that unconventional. Or should they maybe be named in the language of the most associated country/language in the area?
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I prefer English names in the name= tag because of their international recognizability. IHO has defined English names for oceans and seas, as shown in Limits of Oceans and Seas (1953). Also English is the most widely-used language in this project that helps communications among mappers (- even in this forum).
So I think itāll be better to keep the English name in name= tag and include as many multilingual names as possible.
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Actually thereās another issue about the naming of oceans. If a particular sea wasnāt discovered or named within a specific language area, should the language-specific name tag include the name or pronunciation from the language sphere that discovered it, or should it be left blank?
For example, the Sea of Japan, located between the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago, was unknown in Europe until 16th-century Portuguese cartographers labeled it the āSea of Koreaā on their maps. Koreans have called this sea the āEast Seaā (ėķ“, Donghae) since the 1st century, while the Chinese referred to it as the āEast Seaā (ę±ęµ·, Donghai) considering it one body of water with what is now called the East China Sea.
Should the European language name tags be a translation of this āEast Seaā, or should they be left blank? If labeled, wouldnāt there be a risk of mistakenly implying that Europeans had called it the āEast Seaā before the Portuguese naming? I guess there will be a similar dilemma arises with seas bearing ancient name tags, like the Aztec name for the Gulf of Mexico or the Latin name for the English Channel. (Iāve translated them in Korean anywayā¦)
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Well, I think whenever a name changes in one language we just have to create a new node with that languageās spelling. start_event=Portuguese now named the sea Insert Sea Name. Depends how accurate you want to get.
I added a lot of sea names yesterday and some of them I added start_dates to when they were named. Because I think OHM should more ore less represent a map how it looked back then. If a sea didnāt have a name in 1700 then it shouldnāt show up at all on OHM before that time.
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That means there would be several nodes for a single ocean during certain periods? If so, maybe itās important to clarfy which language is the origin of translated nameā¦
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