Kia ora koutou, is it possible for the te reo Māori names to include the tohutō/macron? Also is there a way to add other Māori names as plant names can differ according to region/iwi.
Te reo Māori words simply do not mean the same without the tohutō.
Similar questions can be asked about ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi names. Note that besides the macron, they also have the `okina/glottal stop.
Yes, names can be added with the tohutō/macron (or any UTF-8 character for that matter)
Names can be assigned to any iNat place, this includes the ‘standard’ state/province and district/counties as well as user defined places
Many (most) are already present in the lexicon. I think the issue is how to make them appear as your default common name.
E.g. Pōhutukawa
Metrosideros excelsa (Pohutukawa) · iNaturalist NZ
Look at the list of names/languages at the bottom.
Māori is not in the list of locale settings in a users profile. Maybe there is another way of shifting the default.
There’s a feature request for selecting the language for common names here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/select-language-for-common-names/5430
One of the persistent issues is that a lot of taxa have “English” names that are the default even when the name in the local language is actually the most commonly used in English, as with pohutukawa. Many of these English-language names are obscure or contrived names from the horticulture trade and not used by anyone who sees them in the wild.
Kia ora, this is not about setting the default language for common name. Pōhutukawa is the common name in English, and is now in NZ English predominantly spelled with the macron, just as it would be spelled in Māori. There are many NZ species for which the common English name is a Māori loanword word; usage has recently changed and these words are now spelled with macrons in almost all reliable sources. So the question is can we replace the macron-less English names with correctly-spelled ones? We’re going through this same issue in Wikipedia at the moment.
How does searching and alphabetization work with the macron version of these letters? If a user can type the unaccented letters (e.g. P-O-H-U-T-…) and be shown the correct name (Pōhutukawa) as a suggestion, then it would seem best to just use the accented spelling as the English name. If that breaks some search or suggestion functionality, then the unaccented version could be an alternative English name.
In most systems searching is generally configured to be insensitive to diacritical/accented characters. I expect that is is true for iNat.
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