Timezone translations

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Mark Davis said:
> Ideally we need 6 names, starting with 3 full ones:
> 
> generic: British Time

Unless you want to be targeted by many Northern Irish, I wouldn't do that.
There is no generic name for the time used in the UK.

> winter: ?

Greenwich Mean Time

> summer: British Summer Time

> Thus we can't use the long name Greenwich Mean Time or the abbreviation GMT
> to refer to the "British Winter Time",

You can't *NOT* use the long name Greenwich Mean Time or the abbreviation GMT
to refer to it. Because that is what it is called.

Full stop.
Selah.
End of story.

Are you also going to declare that New York can't use EST? If so, then you
are away with the fairies.

> We also need three distinct abbreviations (if available).
> 
> generic: BT

GMT/BST

> winter: ?

GMT

> summer: BST?

BST

> If an abbreviation is not specified, the fallback will be the corresponding
> long name. If a long name is not specified, the fallback is to a country
> name (if a single zone)

Will you get this right?

> Another twist. The timezone files that are generated are for the default
> language values, in this case, English. The values can actually vary by
> individual country. So we have to decide whether these changes should be
> made for all of English, or for just, say, the UK and Ireland (en_GB,
> en_IE).

I don't know if Ireland uses the term GMT and BST, or something else.
Probably the latter.

> I don't see any reason for not doing it for all of English ("Summer
> Time" is a more meaningful term than "Daylight Savings Time" anyway), but if
> there are any reasons not to do that you might mention them.

How about the fact that many English-speaking people [*] use the term
"Daylight Savings Time"?

[*] Accepting American as a dialect of English for this purpose.

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