Atlantic Ocean: repeated name removal

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@Minh_Nguyen

OSM’s concept of supporting a massively multilingual map, by largely putting the on-the-ground language in name=*, is unusual, almost without precedent in the history of cartography. Most maps aim to be useful to an individual reader, but there are very few panglots (people who speak every language).

Plenty of world atlases primarily label places, rivers, and mountain ranges in the local languages (with parenthetical glosses in the reader’s language). When we designed localized labels in OSM Americana, we took inspiration from some of these atlases. However, relatively few label seas and oceans in the languages of neighboring countries.

A rare counterexample is the Pergamon World Atlas, published in 1968. In this atlas, each continent-scale plate labels the Atlantic Ocean in English, the overall publication’s main language. (The atlas is based on a Polish atlas that presumably fell back on Polish.)

• North Atlantic. Pergamon World Atlas. - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
• West Africa. Pergamon World Atlas. - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

However, each plate of a surrounding country or region labels the same ocean in a romanization of the local language: French off the coast of France, Portuguese off of Iberia, Arabic off of North Africa, Afrikaans off of South Africa. English is glossed in parentheses:

• France. Pergamon World Atlas. - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
• Spain and Portugal. Pergamon World Atlas. - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
• Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia. Pergamon World Atlas. - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
• Republic of South Africa. Pergamon World Atlas. - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

The South China Sea was no less contentious in the 1960s than it is today. This atlas splits the difference, labeling it “Nan Hai” (Chinese) off the coast of China, “Laut Tiongkok Selatan” (Indonesian) off of Indonesia, “Biển Đông” (Vietnamese) off of South Vietnam, and “South China Sea” (English) off of the Philippines – sometimes simultaneously:

• South-East Asia. Pergamon World Atlas. - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
• Indonesia, Thailand and Malaya. Pergamon World Atlas. - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
• Australia and Oceania. Pergamon World Atlas. - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

This approach to labeling, based on the plate’s main focus, would be difficult to translate to an interactive digital map. Even then, it would have to be based on manual hints specific to a style and zoom level, but definitely not raw OSM geodata.