Semicolons don’t solve your problem. You still have to choose from many names. If you always choose the first one, we are back to editing wars about which language comes first. It also makes for a fun map in areas where the decision was to switch the order around all the time to avoid the who-comes-first conflict.
They solve my problem for me. They might not solve the problem for maps which are less worried about looking like ass, and they might not solve the problem for DWG, but that’s not my problem.
It is, as it happens, exactly what I do. Aberteifi/Cardigan shows on cycle.travel as Aberteifi. Bruxelles - Brussel shows as Bruxelles. I’m happy with that.
Currently the separator I use basically is “either a slash or a dash”. The slash might not have spaces, the dash must (because Woluwe-Saint-Lambert - Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe). It works.
So there are two possible things I can take from this:
- The separator for the name tag is
/\s+-\s+|\s*\/\s*/. That seems… unusual? a bit less intuitive than the;used everywhere else? But hey, OSM is like that. If we document this then I can live with it. - There is no separator for the name tag. OSM is not interested in providing a machine-readable list of the common names of a city in its local languages.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯