I started this thread on the Canadian forum, but maybe it is more relevant here…
Over the years, I’ve followed discussions about abbreviations on street signs distractedly, naming streets according to the “on the ground principle”.
I recently found a street named “Rue Louis-St-Laurent” on the street sign, but “Rue Louis-Saint-Laurent” in OSM. The name was changed in OSM a few years ago in what seems an effort to change “St” to “Saint” abbreviations in southern Quebec (Quebec is a Canadian province where French is the official language).
I reviewed the naming convention in the wiki, as well as abbreviations rules, but I was not able to make my mind on this case without ambiguity.
Is/was there a global consensus about changing the name found on a street sign to remove abbreviations?.
Looking at this wiki, in Canada you agreed on the abbreviation of the word Saint.
If you want to know what other countries do, in The Netherlands we don’t abbreviate (hopefully your browser can translate the page). The abbreviated name (as written on a sign) is put in the official_name=*.
In case the “Abbreviations” page is unclear, a good rule of thumb would be: What would be the most informative but still valid spelling of the name, without descending into pedantry? After all, we aren’t in the signmaking business; pixels are much cheaper than steel. This will often require pairing on-the-ground observation with some common sense or local knowledge.
This can sometimes conflict with other forms of official naming, like memorial name designations. Instead, whenever I encounter an abbreviation that’s remarkable enough to tag explicitly, I map the traffic_sign=* node and put it in inscription=*. For example, this street has inconsistent names and abbreviations all up and down it, so the literal spellings can be informative. I often see ALL CAPS in inscription=*, so I figure we can harmlessly relax the prohibition on abbreviations in that key.
The better resource is at Canada/Tagging guidelines#Naming. As far as I know (and, full disclosure, I suggested a lot of these guidelines), these discussions were only ever had for English-speaking Canada - I didn’t want to push rules on a region (Québec) whole language I don’t speak.
My main trouble with abbreviations has always been that it’s not always clear what is an abbreviation and what is already a full name. My usual example is that of St. Clair Avenue, which is not named after a saint. [1]
I know that in Québec the spellings “Saint” and “Sainte” are more widely used; so we have for example Saint-Jérôme, Sainte-Foy, and fleuve Saint-Laurent which are pretty clearly named after saintly things or people.
But even in Québec I would have questions: the French Wikipedia article titles have the names of Louis St-Laurent and Martin St-Louis with “St”, and while St-Laurent’s article text uses “Saint-Laurent” interchangeably, on St-Louis’s article “Saint” is nowhere to be found. So if we see a rue Martin-St-Louis should we have to look up who it’s named after and how their name is spelled? Does it change our decision if the street is in the person’s hometown? It’s not really scalable to look up etymology of every street name containing “St”. [2] Using the spelling most frequently used locally is IMO the most suitable option. But if the French Canadian community opts to expand “St” into “Saint” whenever possible, that’s their prerogative.
That’s something I also have wondered, especially lately, because I want at some point to start adding in streets a tag that shows the signed name, so people can know what name to expect on the street signs.
For Greece, official_name wouldn’t be proper because this would be the street name as it is recognized by the municipality, which is the one responsible for naming streets within settlements. short_name sounds more proper imo.
But you would also face another possible issue, which shortened name to use in case there are multiple signs which abbreviate the same street name differently?
This is the best answer I could have received, and it overlaps with several others. The information I was looking for was so obvious that I should have found it on my own. Thanks for your help!
