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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I live in a barbarian part of the Netherlands north of the Limes boundary, so no Roman roads for me.

Kinda weird how the OpenStreetMap base map behind is configured to show German names first in all of Europe before the local names (Straße von Dover for the Strait of Dover/Pas de Calais). I would expect the Latin names.

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Would be fun to (a) put the historic roman names for places in OSM, and (b) create map tiles that mimic the maps that are shown when clicking on the places. Would make for a much nicer presentation than the default OSM tiles (which aren't exactly meant for this sort of thing).

Well, lots of places already have name:la (Latin) tagged, and since it is a dead(-ish) language it often matches the historic name Romans used, but you'll get edge cases like Lugdunum Batavorum which has been used as the Latin name of Leiden since the renaissance, but which is now considered to have been the name of nearby Katwijk. So the tag name:la=Lugdunum Batavorum is correct for Leiden (it is called that in Latin), but arguably not historically correct (it's not the same Lugdunum the Romans knew).

Similarly, I find it weird that there is no direct route from Lille/Tournai to Rotterdam through Belgium. There is a huge detour over Maastricht.

Maybe this part of Belgium was not sufficiently under Roman control and too unsafe to travel through.

As far as I can recall, this part of the Lower Countries was still mostly swamps.

There were still plenty of Roman settlements to the north of Brussels, so it's a bit curious that Belgica itself seems hardly populated. Maybe because of that tiny town that kept on resisting Roman rule?

I guess the author is German and so his config spilled over?

It's probably the map tiles from openstreetmap.de, which show names preferably in German. Unlike the tiles from openstreetmap.org, which show names in the country's native language by default.

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