Hello! I am a member of the Ukrainian community. Recently, I have become interested in the multilingual representation of names. I have some questions regarding whether the correct tag is used for place names in Ukraine written in the Korean writing system.
Here is a table with Ukrainian place names. The first column represents the name in Ukrainian, the endonym. The second column is the romanized version of the Ukrainian name in Latin script, and the third column contains the data currently recorded in the name:ko tag.
Ukrainian Name
Romanized Name
Current name:ko Data
Київ
Kyiv
키이우
Дніпро
Dnipro
드니프로
Львів
Lviv
리비우
Херсон
Kherson
헤르손
In the relevant section of the wiki Multilingual Names, the first paragraph states:
In addition, some cases require to add a script name to the tag according to ISO 15924 name:code-Script=*.
Is my assumption correct that these names should not be filled in the name:ko tag because they are not names written in the Korean language, but rather Ukrainian names written in Korean mixed script?
Would it be more accurate to move these names to the name:uk-Kore tag?
Additionally, I am curious about the tools available for converting Ukrainian names into Korean mixed script.
This text is a machine translation from Ukrainian to English, so it may contain errors. I would appreciate your response.
It seems that the difference between the name:ko tag and the name:uk-Kore tag might lie in their intended use. The name:ko tag could be reserved for names written in the Korean language, while the name:uk-Kore tag might be more suitable for representing Ukrainian names written in the Korean writing system. If this interpretation is correct, the names in the table, being Ukrainian endonyms transliterated into Korean script, would presumably be more appropriately categorized under the name:uk-Kore tag rather than name:ko.
This is a tricky one that doesn’t always have a clear answer.
There is indeed a general guideline to avoid mass transliterations, but it’s not a blanket ban. It’s also not really clear that there is any widely adopted standard for rendering transliterated names that may not be actually names in the target language.
Example: name:ko-Latn vs name:en. I helped clean up a lot of incorrect name:en tags in the past. But it’s a very fine line and not at all clear. For example, is name:ko=공항대로 + name:en=Gonghang-daero a valid combination? I would personally say yes, it’s valid, since this is an officially recognized name for the road in English, even though it happens to be a transliteration (sort of). Similarly name:ko=삼성 + name:en=Samsung seems fine to me, because this is a recognized name in English, and additionally, the transliterations cannot be reliably derived by machine (ex: Samsung would be correctly romanized as Samseong, but for historical reasons, the rules are ignored).
It could be argued that some of these cases, like name:ko=당산 should have name:ko-Latn=Dangsan rather than name:en=Dangsan and so on, but it is hard to know where to draw a line for practical reasons. I am not aware of any map renderer, for example, that would look for a name:*-Latn tag, and I’m almost positive that no renderers would look for a name:*-Kore tag. So I think any retagging should have a broader consensus among data consumers, as this would have a real impact on map usability.
For example, if you removed the name:ko tag, I believe Korean themed maps would just show the name in Ukranian, like Київ.
@Ian_Wagner Since I wrote this message, I’ve researched the topic a bit more and found the BCP 47 Extension T standard, which allows tagging content that has been transformed from one language to another.
In short, transformed content from Ukrainian to Korean should be tagged as name:ko-t-uk.
Here’s the discussion thread where the topic is currently being discussed:
