Welcome To Mongolia's New Postal System: An Atlas Of Random Words

This is an interesting way to address a letter to say the least, but it sounds like Mongolia is going with it...

http://www.npr.org/2016/06/19/48251...random-words

Interesting concept in marketing, but how will Mongolians cope with the concept of many alien words: lettuce, palm, shark is not an address they will relate to outside most addresses, even in the more cosmopolitan suburbs of Ulaanbaatar. Rock, grass, hill will be a common address!

I don't really get it. We already have each postal location in the US identified by number with ZIP+4. Does the USPS pay any attention any more to addresses in sorting the mail? If all we want is a unique identifier, there are better was than three random English words. Assuming you could get the postal authorities of multiple countries to agree on it, a few letters and numbers (like license plates) could serve as globally unique identifiers. The trick would be identifying enough unique prefixes to go with each country. But that could easily be done by starting off with two letter prefixes like we have for Country internet domain names, followed by the rest of the ID. Even that could be easily extended to a second "prefix" that allowed for specific regions in each country, followed by the rest being random letters and numbers.

And for Mongolia, having read the article, I don't get the utility or practicality of the concept. Two things are noted in the article supposedly justifying the concept. One is that many of the people are nomadic, and don't have fixed addresses. How does this help? Somebody has to know where they are to deliver mail to them as they move around. If you ask a nomad where they are, they are not going to know the three word name for the particular 3 meter square they've pitched their tent in for the next few days. No one is going to know the three word name for patch of earth without looking it up. How is that done? Isn't it going to have to be cross-referenced to a system already known like latitude and longitude. So are nomads supposed to be able to keep authorities posted on their locations by latitude and longitude? And if they could report their location by latitude and longitude, why wouldn't that be sufficient? The other reason given was that even in cities, locations are not commonly known by streets and street addresses. It seems to me that even so, locations could be assigned unique ID's a little less cumbersome, like our ZIP+4 codes, for fixed locations in a city.

Somebody is being too clever with this idea.

Basil

I don't think the US would use this as we already name every street and number every house, etc. In Mongolia's case they apparently don't use street names, house numbers, etc. They could go around and name every street and number every building, etc, but that would take a lot of time and money. It's easier, quicker, and cheaper for them to use a system that's already in place, even if it's kind of strange. I don't know how that would help them track down nomads, but I doubt they send or receive much mail, anyway.

In Ulaanbaatar the postal system is pretty conventional, with post codes and all that, and is based around the old Soviet system. Technically, post codes are also in use elsewhere in the country but people tend to use addresses like "24th kilometre Bayankhongur road, such-and-such soum" and mail will get there because there's not much else around. Most of the nomads have some sort of Internet connection anyway, unless they're really out in the boonies in the west of the country. The family in the local soum will look after mail for them until they get back.

Here's a more in-depth article about this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...read/487160/

It would be interesting to collect covers addressed in this fashion...