Grrrr. The keyboard on this laptop is annoying. To finish an unfinished message...
On Sat, 20 Jun 2020 at 14:40, Paul Allen <pla16...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, 20 Jun 2020 at 14:31, Christoph Hormann <o...@imagico.de> wrote: > >> > loan words. Qanat IS a word that appears in English dictionaries and >> it IS >> > the British English name for such structures. >> >> That might be the case here - but only because English speakers have >> started communicating about this kind of thing using that term quite a long >> time ago. This is not the case for elements of the geography outside of >> English speaking countries that English speakers have no broad awareness of >> (of which there are plenty). >> > > Yeah, but Britain imposed its imperial colonialism upon much of the world, > so > we've been using local words for a lot of geographical features for a long > time. > > As for terms we don't already know, the tendency in English would be to > adopt > the local word if we found a need to refer to it. > > A bigger problem, I think, is a tendency > ... for us to force round pegs into square holes. It's not just that the locals give it a different name, it is actually different. Like insisting that a qanat is just an underground canal. > We should definitely map things that do not physically occur in >> > English-speaking parts of the world. But we should use the British >> English >> > name (which may or may not have been derived from the local name) to tag >> > them. >> >> That would mean giving up on the goal of creating the best map of the >> world through collection of local knowledge of the geography and replacing >> it with the goal of creating a map of the world as it is perceived my >> English speakers. >> > Erm, nope, I didn't say that. I said that if British English has a name for something then we should use it. I didn't say that we should force square pegs into round holes. To me it isn't whether it's called a qanat or an Undergroundwatertransfersystemfedfromawellandwithverticalmaintenanceshafts (as it might be named in some languages) but what it actually is. A qanat is more than just an underground canal whatever we call it, and deserves to be tagged differently. -- Paul
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