Local City Names

[Nathaniel]

@McAllisterW:

Glad you are enjoying Natural Earth!

Map Feature Name Guidelines for Natural Earth (scroll down)

https://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/map-update-committee/

Local names are definitely a goal of this project, but it hasn’t been fully realized yet. Would love if you could help build this out!

name_par is for labeling places on a map like this:

name && “(” && name_par && “)”

Where && is the concatenation symbol in your scripting language.

name_alt is mostly targeted for use in disambiguation (eg: geocoding), but not for consistent display on a map. There can be multiple variants separated by comma , characters. There could be more logical sorting for this. But it’s more “you might remember this as / locals know this as”.

You also missed name_ascii which is where the plain ascii version of the name contents goes for better (simple) search support.

Really this should have a few extra columns:

name_local in latinized form, with accent marks.

local_script in native script (korean, japanese, chinese, thai, arabic, hebrew, etc).

One thing that’s prevented this from happening is UTF8 support lacking in ArcMap. But QGIS works very well for this.

_Nathaniel

[mcallisterw]

Thanks for replying, I guess you could really go to town on placenames, I’d love to help.

You could have fields for the common English name as already exists, but separate fields for different types of alternative, such as different romanisations of non-roman languages (such as Peking and Běijīng), old names given by imperial powers (Bombay, Danzig), local names for places in the local languages (with another field for those languages not spoken by the majority in their own territory such as Welsh), old Soviet names (Leningrad), perhaps suffixes like the ’upon Tyne’ part of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Would require a lot of people’s imput though

[Nathaniel]

Added a ticket here:

https://github.com/nvkelso/natural-earth-vector/issues/13

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