161–170 of 233 posts
Alternative solution: put the e back in that the apostrophe is standing in place of. St Maryes Place
St. James means something else.
So unless they go for St. Jamess it's have to be St. Jameses.
As far as I can tell, this isn't an issue with the specific database itself, but the standard they are required to record geographic data in, which the end of the article mentions as "BS 7666". https://www.agi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BS7666Guid... # Standard data types used in BS 7666 CharacterString: a sequence of alphanumeric characters ... If I had to guess, alphanumeric is interpreted as [0-9a-z]. The s…
Australia removed apostrophes from all official place names back in 1966, leading to names like Surfers Paradise, Princes Highway and Wisemans Ferry. Given the date, I doubt computing was a major consideration though.
It's led to some interesting outcomes - for example, I've seen people write "Princess Highway" a fair few times, presumably on account of the official spelling ("Princes") falling confusingly somewhere half-way between the more usual "Prince's" and "Princess".
In day to day use, I don't think most people actually use the apostrophe-free official spellings, at least for names comprised of ordinary English words (Prince's Hwy, Surfer's Paradise), but it might be more of a free-for-all with proper names (Wiseman's Ferry or Wisemans Ferry).
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That's because you're not going to Tesco the registered company, you're going to (one of) Tesco's (shops). It's just traditional and logical grammar, not misnaming.
Thank you, I'll remember that next time I pay a visit to Sainbury's's!
My point isn't that all business names are treated that way, just that the ones that are the reason is grammatical tradition not (for the most part) people who incorrectly think the shop is called "Tesco's" or whatever.
But unrecoverably modifying the data to fit within constraints on input, storage or output seems a rather poor "solution".
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That's because you're not going to Tesco the registered company, you're going to (one of) Tesco's (shops). It's just traditional and logical grammar, not misnaming.
This is not true. We don't apply this "rule" to any other establishment, e.g. people don't say "I'm going to Burger King's" or "I'm going to Costa's". There's nothing to analyze: "Tesco's" is just wrong . It's not the name of the business.
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Interestingly, the OpenStreetMap project considers road signage to be unquestionable "ground truth". If the sign changes, the map changes. We can't use any other database because that might not be available under a compatible licence.
I haven’t checked but how do they handle streets if the signs have two different spellings? There was a street growing up that was spelled two different ways and I still don’t know what the right one was!
Australia removed apostrophes from all official place names back in 1966, leading to names like Surfers Paradise, Princes Highway and Wisemans Ferry. Given the date, I doubt computing was a major consideration though.
And my father-in-law is still upset about it. It's led to some interesting outcomes - for example, I've seen people write "Princess Highway" a fair few times, presumably on account of the official spelling ("Princes") falling confusingly somewhere half-way between the more usual "Prince's" and "Princess". In day to day use, I don't think most people actually use the apostrophe-free official spellings, at least for na…
The "Princess Hwy" thing is also common I think because the pronunciation most often used sounds a lot like "Princess", particularly when it's run right into "Highway" without a gap.
Next: due to an issue with primary key mapping, all cities in the US are now required to have a unique name, so all affected cities must work together to come up with new names. Start with the Springfields.