Something I’ve been curious about is that some Slavic languages typographically distinguish between the generic and specific by putting the specific in quotation marks, not only in road names but also in the names of points of interest and buildings. Are there grammatical reasons for this? Could it influence the choice to omit the generic from name=*? As we discussed in this footnoted thread, East Asian languages tend not to separate the generic and specific in writing or signage. We need to strike a balance between reflecting real-world practices and ensuring that the data is usable in a global context, because some use cases like search cannot inherently be limited to a particular country or culture.
Similar to the Slavic practice, English used to capitalize the specific but not the generic. Over time, this distinction has disappeared for some feature types like roads, while other feature types like place names have instead tended to drop the generic. Exceptions abound, often creating problems in addressing systems. Many U.S. cities have a street named “Broadway” without any generic. In Spanish-influenced California, El Camino Real is such a famous road that you can say “El Camino”, dropping the specific, and any Californian knows what you’re referring to. Some less famous streets have been named after it, as just “El Camino”. The Spanish left lots of toponyms ending in -ero. English speakers appended a generic to some, like Divisadero Street, but appended a definite article to others, like The Embarcadero – a generic specific.
Sticking with California, the official statewide system for naming bridges uses several generics, such as “Overhead” if a bridge over a railway is named for the street it carries, “Undercrossing” if the bridge is named for the road passing under it, and “Separation” if it’s named for two roads that would otherwise intersect. But if a bridge is named for the waterway it crosses, then the name lacks a generic. Thus “Guadalupe River” can refer to a number of road bridges. “River” is only a generic in the name of the river itself.