Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2019 17:12:33 -0800
From: Michael Patrick <geodes...@gmail.com>
To: tagging@openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [Tagging] Drain vs ditch
A survey of international and some national lexicons indicates that the two
terms 'ditch' and 'drain' are equivalent used in the context of liquids
from the smallest to largest scales.
The term 'drain' however seems mostly to apply at the interface where the
water transitions from the substrate ( soil ) to free running water, down
flow from that the water is 'channeled' through ditches, fluves, shutes,
spillways, canals, and a multitude of functional confinements. One of the
earliest ( 1920 ) legal references to British and American law notes this
equivalence, and the following an extract from a 2017 global standard
saying basically the same thing.
[...]
Local terminology takes precedence, at the highest level it is available.
While a dictionary might be a useful start for determining a meaning, there
is almost always some better source of definitions in a specific domain,
culture, and region, and location. The U.N., E.U., U.K., Scotland, and down
to Renfrewshire all have documentation of what terms mean in those local
contexts, for example.
Almost always, a single word will be immediately overloaded when used world
wide.Human languages have compound words, adjectives, verbs and adverbs for
a reason, and tagging schemes have equivalents.
Michael Patrick
Data Ferret
Michael, thank you for your extensive and instructive research.
Mark
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