Moderator: Cartographers



So why wasn't that applied to other maps? The British Isles map should have names in Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Cymru or whatever they call it for example. Every region in Europe has dialects, some more important than others like Catalan which is used in the Catalonia region, but at the end of the day Spanish is the language of all of Spain and the official language of the whole nation.steve monkey wrote:This is not a map of Spain and Portugal, it is a map of Iberia, which is a geographical not a political entity. It would therefore be out of keeping with the map to make all the place names Spanish or Portugese only. One of the features of Iberia which makes it so distinct within Europe, is the diversity of the peoples who live there. To ignore this fact is to ignore the history and present reality of the region. All the nations' languages should be used in their proper context; ie Catalan names in Catalunya, Portugese names in Portugal, Basque names in the Basque Country, Galician names in Galicia and Castillian (Spanish) names in the non-autonomous regions of Spain.

If I remember well around 60,000 people in Scotland speak Gaelic. In Switzerland it is different. Switzerland is a trilingual state with German, French and Italian being official languages of the country. In Spain the only official language is Spanish. The others are only used regionally and do not have that status and Spanish is official in those regions alongside the other dialect.steve monkey wrote:It wasn't applied to other maps because it probably wasnt considered at the time, that in and of itself isnt reason for it not to occur with the Iberia map. Secondly, the language question is considerably more important in Spain than in the UK. (In Scotland for example noone speaks Scots, it's a dead language). If I can compare Spain to a better example, I would choose Switzerland, where the federal structure of the state means that the cantons vary between French, German and Italian speaking.
I am not arguing for the usage of dialects for naming purposes on maps, simply that in a geographical region the national languages be used therein.
Given these points and the ones I raised earlier, I dont understand your ambivelance to having the territories named in their correct languages.

I would call the territories what the natives call it.steve monkey wrote:This is not a map of Spain and Portugal, it is a map of Iberia, which is a geographical not a political entity. It would therefore be out of keeping with the map to make all the place names Spanish or Portugese only. One of the features of Iberia which makes it so distinct within Europe, is the diversity of the peoples who live there. To ignore this fact is to ignore the history and present reality of the region. All the nations' languages should be used in their proper context; ie Catalan names in Catalunya, Portugese names in Portugal, Basque names in the Basque Country, Galician names in Galicia and Castillian (Spanish) names in the non-autonomous regions of Spain.
I believe in Wales there are many more that actually speak Gaelic. I will check about that for you. Still everyone knows how to speak English which is the lingua franca if you want to call it such for Britain and Ireland. I think Spain is in a similar situation although not the same of course...steve monkey wrote:I take your point about Gaelic, I really didn't know there were that number of speakers of it in Scotland.
It's been fun debating with you Ruben and I agree with you - we are going to disagree on this matter.
I hope Bad Speler, that you'll consider the points I've raised, and once again, that's a really nice map you've created there. I look forward to playing on it.
