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So, Irish has a genitive case for place names. We're starting to translate townlands.ie into Irish (using Transifex), and we'll need to use the genitive name in some cases (e.g. "Baronies in Wicklow" would need to use the genitive name of "Wicklow" (FYI "Cill Mhantáin" is gen, "Cill Mhantáin" is nom.)). Logainm, the official Irish Placenames Database, has released their data under ODbL, and we're going to use that. It lists the genitive name of placenames. So we have a source. Is there a best way to add the genitive name of a placename?
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In Poland we did an import / merging of official PRNG (Państwowy Rejestr Nazw Geograficznych) dataset, and such genitive names if available were tagged with name:genitive. Also, name:adjective was imported (though it's not as comprehensive and apparently was used in PRNG for adjectives that may be tricky.) |
Maybe I'm confused - but why would you need two forms of a name (if you're storing "genitive_name:ga" I presume you've also got "name:ga")? I can understand how a place name's spelling might change depending on what part it's playing in a sentence (English is pretty rare in not doing this), but why would you need to store the other cases? For example, I can find "Suomi" ("Finland") in OSM but not e.g. "Suomeen" (something like "something being brought to Finland").
Yes we'll also have
name:ga. We want to be able to use OSM-the-database to display information about Irish places. Yes it's mostly a spelling/pronouncation change. But I don't think it's automatically computable in all cases. One aspect is automatically computable, and we'll calculate that. But for the non-automatic ways, I can't see any other option than to add it to OSM.I wonder how many other languages have irregular placename nouns? A quick web search finds a wikipedia article that suggests Turkish might - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_phonology - but there may be others.
German has the same thing and even differing Genitive forms for different purposes (Schwarzwald - des Schwarzwalds Gipfel - Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte) but I seriously doubt OSM would be the right place to store such things. It's not a dictionary.
How do people know how to pronounce it? I can imagine that not every Irish person knows all townlands in Ireland. So there must be some grammar rules that allow you to convert between the different forms.
In any case, it seems more like a job for a dictionary for me.
You could probably make a dictionary inside your app, derived from the logainm data. Then a string like "Baronies of {{name}}" can be translated to "xxx {{gen_name}}", which will use the correct genetive for all townlands.
Could you add a foreign key ref to Logainm? In other words, tag logainm_ref=12345, and then people who want to can pull the genitive from that?
@Richard Yes we're already adding
logainm:refas a 'foreign key', so that is a possibility.@SomeoneElse I think Albanian has a separate case marker for "to $PLACE", which is shown on signs (vs the name of the town/city itself).