Hi and G’day!
While watching the Womens Soccer World Cup I noticed that the names of the city are given in English and a local aboriginal name:
- Adelaide/Tarntanya
- Brisbane/Meaanjin
- Melbourne/Naarm
- Perth/Boorloo
- Sydney/Gadigal
These are the names FIFA is using. I checked whether they were already in OSM, and wanted to add the missing names.
Adelaide
“Tarntanya” is from the Kaurna language, so I added name:zku=Tarntanya
Brisbane
“Meanjin” was in name:aus, but the Turrbal language has its own ISO code, so I moved it to name:yxg=Meanjin, according to the Australian tagging guidelines. I kept the slightly different spelling.
Melbourne
Added Woiwurrung name:wyi=Naarm
Perth
already has name:nys=Boorlo
Sydney
had no aboriginal name tagged yet, and the situation is a bit confusing:
Fifa uses “Gadigal” which seems to be the name of a clan that lived in the area. The language would seem to be Dharug, so name:xdk=Gadigal looks good.
Australia Post is also using Gadigal as traditional place name of Sydney which you can use to address mail. So that makes this name pretty “official”.
But – there are also quite a few mentions of “Warrane” as the traditional name for Sydney. This was originally only applied to Sydney Cove, and OSM has Warrane on the node of Sydney Cove. Tourism Australia is using “Sydney / Warrane” a lot, and seems to have done so before “Gadigal” was adopted by the post…
In the end, it looks like both “Gadigal” and “Warrane” are used, and both could / should be tagged on the place node. As far as I understand, both are from the Dharug language, so I made it name:xdk=Gadigal and alt_name:xdk=Warrane and added notes for reference.
Maybe in the future there will be an “official” traditional name for Sydney?
I hope that I didn’t step into a freshly opened can of worms with this… I just found it fascinating enough to write this up. Also, I guess something like this might have happened to other mappers:
Wait, that’s interesting, is it on OSM already?
(1 mins later) No? Nice, I’ll just add it…
(10 mins later) Oh, that’s a bit more complicated, let me get it right…
(5 hours later) Wow, so much information… Now, hopefully that will be okay…
2 posts - 2 participants
Ce sujet de discussion accompagne la publication sur https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/aboriginal-place-names-for-cities-in-australia/101900