Welcome to this discussion! As you can see, this discussion has dragged on quite a while and is a bit difficult to follow. Your point about the importance of name:* is well taken, but various posts above have touched on why it’s insufficient to rely on a key that indicates which name:* to display. Here are some links to individual comments as a starting point, to avoid repeating these arguments:
- The local names are useful even when the map primarily labels the user’s preferred language. OSM Americana demonstrates that the clutter is manageable as long as names can be deduplicated reliably.
- We cannot completely avoid the need to separate multiple names by a delimiter. Names in different languages are just a special case of the more general issue that a feature can have multiple names in the local language or multiple names in the user’s preferred language.
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A proposal for
name:languagewas rejected in part because mappers didn’t want to repeat the same information on every named feature in a language region. -
An alternative proposal for
default_languagewas also rejected. Mappers used it anyways, but its values are often suspect, and it would be an easy target for vandalism or accidental breakage.
If you’re following me so far, what remains is a debate about whether to insert human-readable punctuation or a machine-readable delimiter between multiple tag values when the values happen to be names (but aren’t alternative names, official names, short names, or the names of destinations, brands, operators, or owners).