I also wish gorge could be an area (ditto valley) but it's an improvement to have the physical element tagged in addition to a park area related to that element. Seeing how you handled it here also shows me how to handle something else on my to-do list. Thanks!

I think it's best to leave the name on both the element and the recreation area. While I can think of a number of valid ways to say "park"/"recreation area", I try not to modify Dakota/Lakota names like this and represent the way my sources worded things as accurately as I can.

Good point on Clear Lake. I've tried to be cautious about speculating names beyond what my sources say, but there's a pattern elsewhere (Lake Andes, Belle Fourche, Cherry Creek) of my sources attributing natural-feature Dakota place names onto adjacent towns named for those features as well. The town is named for the lake, and the lake has a Dakota name (though it translates to "Hidden Woods River Lake", not "Clear Lake"). If Dell Rapids (the town) gets named for the feature, Clear Lake should too. I'll add it on my next changeset.

Dell Rapids refers to the Dell Rapids, the actual geographic feature. I'd assigned the name to the city recreation area as it seemed to correspond *close enough* to the geographic feature, but a better-mapped set of elements representing the actual geographic feature would be far better!

What was the source for the Lakota translation of Mountain Plains and North Spearfish? I am curious because as a mapper focused on Dakota/Lakota, I'm always interested in finding more elusive primary sources on these languages that I might have missed.

Thanks for the reminder. I'm fairly new to OSM and wasn't used to knowing how to look for existing nodes at first.

(Oops, I guess today I learned that the markdown code used in profiled and diaries doesn’t apply to Comments).

Thanks for that clarification. I'd tried to think of any number of possible replies, but knowing that about the legal status of lemmata helps a lot.

For what it's worth, *most* of what I'm doing has an original-research aspect. On name:dak entries in particular I'm using UMN [Orthography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sioux_language#Writing_systems), which (despite being the most common orthography in Isaƞṭi Dakota communities and education programs in 2026) is not used by *any* of my primary sources, be they dictionaries or not. This means a process of word component identification and orthography conversion for all name:dak entries. Sometimes this is a very deep research dive (Huḣba Ożu/”Okoboji” and the Waḳaƞ Ożaƞżaƞ historical site come to mind) and sometimes it’s very simple. Likewise, any name:lkt entry where my source is Dakota (most of them) requires a similar process to map spellings between the two dialects and spell it out in Standard Lakota Orthography.

But a meaningful minority of name:lkt data points are as simple as lemmata from the NLD dictionary (an incredible resource). Thinking through this, I know which bundles of content I’d have to walk back if that was a possible copyright/legal issue, but I’m glad to hear that it isn’t one.

I should really start writing some Diary entries about the basics of Lakota/Dakota and my process.

Buffalo Ridge allegedly refers to the whole ridge, which spans multiple counties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Ridge

...but according to the county, it was named by Nicollet for a Dakota buffalo effigy that, judging by articles on the topic, must be in close proximity to this high point: https://www.murraycountymn.com/government/township_government/chanarambie.php

...and USGS data records this point as "Buffalo Ridge", probably due to the aforementioned association: https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names/640621

I see a decent case for naming this point Buffalo Ridge, despite it being the name for the wider ridge as well.

As an aside, the buffalo-effigy for which the ridge is named and the stone-man effigy from which the "Íƞyaƞ Wic̣aṡta Káġapi" name springs are frustratingly hard to locate; the buffalo-effigy is supposedly on this hill but sources disagree on the man-effigy, placing it either next to the buffalo or associating it with another badly damaged effigy documented in 1972 and located fifteen miles NNE. These Dakota artworks are too small to make out via satellite imagery, easily damaged and almost certainly on private property, and neither carry historical markers or searchable NRHP markings. I may have to settle for some vagueness in their locations.

I'll check those as I get a chance - some digging tells me that you were looking at the same primary source that I would consider most authoritative for Lakota names in this area (I have other sources elsewhere) - though as someone with some deeper-dive knowledge about pronunciation and orthography, I try to adjust for precise orthography, mirror :lkt and :dak when the wording is identical, etc.

Fortunately it was stored in more than one place. Another source (which allows downloads!) is here: https://ramadda.org/repository/entry/show?entryid=ee502b16-c056-430c-807a-4015a39e6e35

Great question! Orthography can be a tricky topic with Dakota language as there are several systems in use and no single standard used by everyone. The tribe uses a writing style with no orthography marks on their main website, but their tribal college’s language-education community uses an orthography that aims to convey precisely how to pronounce words and names: https://www.swdakotadictionary.com/index (The "About the Dakota Language" section goes more into depth on the logic of it). Minnesota Dakota tribes and some Canadian tribes also use this system, either officially or in language-education content specifically - but in practice speakers differ widely on how much pronunciation information they incorporate into their writing.

For my adding and back-checking of Dakota place-names to the OSM database, usually I try to use an orthography approach that provides the most possible pronunciation information (from which someone reading it can always subtract things). In this specific case, however, where there’s more than one avenue of *official* tribe-related name sources, I may want to make use of alt_name:dak and description:dak fields in a future changeset to incorporate both possible spellings and explain the meaning of the name.