Usage of less common German translations of city names

There is at least a precedent for Livorno, where the old English name Leghorn is captured using old_name:en.

There are also many name:de tags in Poland in places which used to be part of Germany until the end of the Second World War, e.g., around Gdansk. I’m sure this aspect of usage of the name tag has been discussed before, but I can’t find the link. I remember being in Poland, and someone asking about sources for German names in a non-OSM context, and others considering such a request as a bit tactless. Obviously the OSM-PL community has accepted this usage, which probably has low impact on them.

For the most part I would expect most of these German names for villages and, all but a few, towns have completely fallen out of any daily usage. There are examples of where these names may still be valuable in current usage: for instance the Dehio handbook covering the former provinces of East and West Prussia uses them for academic art history.

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@ToniE: ich glaube es geht eher darum, dass name:de gesetzt ist und angezeigt wird, diese deutschen Namen aber heute nicht mehr (oder nur noch so selten) gebräuchlich sind, dass die meisten deutschen Leser damit weniger anfangen, als mit dem originalsprachlichen Namen. Hedaja hat das besser beschrieben: solche Namen sollten in old_name:de verschoben werden, wenn sie so gar nicht mehr gebräuchlich sind, oder wenigstens Kartendarstellungen verwenden, die beides anzeigen

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deutsche namen für polnische städte nicht mehr zeitgemäss !! - Deutschland (Germany) - OpenStreetMap Community Forum

and here the same disussion vice versa

Auffällige Edits mit name:pl - Deutschland (Germany) - OpenStreetMap Community Forum

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Ungefähr das wollte ich mit meinem ursprünglichen Beitrag thematisieren. Jede Applikation, die lokalisierte Karten anzeigen möchte, wird, wenn sie ausschließlich ‘name:de’ für die deutsche Darstellung verwendet, eine ganze Menge dieser nicht gebräuchlichen Ortsnamen verwenden. Ich weiß aber selbst nicht, wie und wo man die Grenze ziehen kann oder sollte. Roma/Rom ist noch relativ einfach und auch harmlos, Plzen/Pilsen geht vielleicht gerade noch, aber Ljubljana/Laibach fände ich schon nicht mehr in Ordnung.
Mal abgesehen davon, dass ich mich im Hinblick auf die deusche Geschichte seltsam fühle, wenn auf meiner Wetterkarte die Hälfte aller ungarischen Städte deutsch benannt sind, kommt man da in einigen Gegenden sicher auch schnell zwischen politische Fronten.

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Please, I don’t want to start a fight like those threads. I was simply pointing out that on an all-German map, some countries look weird because the use names that are largely unknown and unused.
In addition, my impression was that many of these unusual German names have been added quite recently (in the last 1-3 years). Although I don’t have any hard data to back that up and @ToniE already seems to have disproved it.

I am aware of that and I support the proposal to shift german names which are no longer in use (or even not welcome) in those places from name:de to old_name:de. I provided the links merely in reply to the post of @SK53 - there have been several discussions about the same issue before and there is no harm in just having a look into what had already been discussed in the same context earlier.

We’ve noticed a similar thing here in Australia, where small country towns & villages have had name:ru, name:zh & various other languages added. It would be very highly doubtful though that anybody would refer to a village of 200 people in country Australia by a Russian, Chinese or any other name!

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Yeah, seems to be strange. But for ‘ru’ and ‘zh’ the difference is not the language only but also the non-latin alphabet. So could be reasonable to have “Alice Springs” in Cyrillic letters for the sake of being able to pronounce it correctly as a Russian speaking person?

Just my 2€ ct

I, personally, will leave the decision whether this is OK or necessary to the local mappers.

dem stimme ich zu. Aber, und mal ganz grob gesprochen: je weiter ich vom Ort entfernt wohne, desto weniger relevant wird meine Meinung dazu, oder?
Das spricht mMn dafür, die Entscheidung den lokalen Mappern (d/m/w) zu überlassen.

Most of those examples follow the exonym recommendations by the StAGN, see https://www.stagn.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/StAGN_Publikationen/020809_Exoliste_hoch_RH_JS.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=3 - e.g. Fünfkirchen or Stuhlweißenburg in Hungary. I’d still consider some of those examples as a candidate for old_name:de instead of name:de (and bear in mind that the publication is dated as well, published 2002).

If you are looking out for a German embassy while walking around in Bratislava, you’ll find the “Deutsche Botschaft Pressburg”. Preßburg once had been the name:de for Bratislava in OSM data as well (about five years ago) while now name:de has Bratislava and you’ve got an old_name:de entry of Preßburg. But then you’ll find some regions in Austria where the use of Preßburg or Pressburg is still common. The same with Laibach.

E.g. in regard to the style at openstreetmap.de and the ordering of local name vs name:de: countries and capitals (and large cities) get the localized name (e.g. Italien, Rom) first while otherwise you get the local name first, see localized_name_first and localized_name_second in openstreetmap-carto-de/project.mml at master · giggls/openstreetmap-carto-de · GitHub.

I don’t think this is sufficient. For instance think about “Peking”. Do you think any local will care about/ now about how we call the Chinese capital? Or vice versa do you think any German mapper will take a look into name:zh?
Of course no Chinese (without German language skills) will understand or use “Peking”. In the end, name:de have to be carefully maintained by German community and to be clear, Wikipedia is not really a source in that regards.

This is, strictly speaking, a different problem, that of transliteration. Again widely discussed on various mailing lists in the past, for instance this thread.

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In some cases, absolutely they will. One very well-known example at the moment is “Kyiv”. People in Ukraine have been very vocal that people referring to their capital in other languages should use that Ukrainian name and not a version of the Russian name “Kiev”. They don’t have direct control of that of course, since they don’t have direct control of what word people not in Ukraine use; but certainly where I am “Kyiv” is far more widely used now.

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Yeah, I agree w.r.t. this global aspect.

I wasn’t clear enough in my statement:

I guess, the OP was referring to villages in Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, … where some centuries ago people migrated from Germany (“Siebenbürger Sachsen”, …) to the area, founded villages, towns, …
Some areas were part of the Austrian Empire and got/had (?) German names. Some people over there still speak German, the names of the villages have been changed to Hungarian, Slovenian, … names, but still the German names are in use (by a minority?).

‘name:de’ versus ‘old_name:de’ in these particular cases should be decided by locals, I’d say.

This is very interesting, thank you. I didn’t know that those were actually still official names today.
And thanks to Street View, I now know that Pécs even has “Fünfkirchen” on its street sign. Others don’t, like Székesfehérvár, at least not on those I checked.

I must admit that I seem to be clearly wrong about those names being “weird”, obscure and unused today. Also, I made the mistake to think of OSM only as a map instead of the database that it really is. I am tempted to retract my original post and put shame on the products that use OSM data without giving enough thought to what the data actually means.
The way openstreetmap.de does it, having both names on the same map, seems to be best.

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Initially, this is what I thought most of those names were. But the longer I think about them and the more research I do, the more I see that most of these names are not as old-fashioned and unused as I assumed they were.
I am not ashamed to admit my own arrogance on the subject and change my mind. :slight_smile:

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Indeed, I had a colleague who’s wife grew up in Romania as a German speaker in the 1980s (IIRC she qualified for German citizenship too).

For sure this applies for all internationally significant cities, objects and places. For small townships, villages natural objects and the like I would agree to @ToniE

as only people with local knowledge will know if a German name is locally in use (or at least known) or not or even unwelcome due to various reasons. The second topic I linked above discussed the same issue vice versa and most of the (German) participants argued that it cannot be accepted that some foreign mappers add names in foreing language to small German villages which are not in common use at all.

But then you’ll find some regions in Austria where the use of Preßburg or Pressburg is still common. The same with Laibach.

and arguably they are closer to the target than German speakers from Germany.