[tz] Idea for internationalized time point unique time zone abbreviations

[Boruch Baum]

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On 06/06/2012 12:16 PM, Alan Perry wrote:
> 
> I thought that the abbreviations were intended to be the local 
> abbreviations used for the display of a time value within
> particular timezones and reflect local practice.  I didn't think
> that they were supposed to be unique.  The Zone name is unique.
> Why does a timezone need two unique identifiers?
> 
I can't speak for the OP, but ...

The attraction of the proposal to me is that there be unique
identifiers that are easy to type, easy to work with, and that will be
sufficiently attractive to people and mass media that they actually
use the identifiers to the extent that what they input into a computer
program / mobile app corresponds to something that can be parsed.


> If this proposal is adopted, is the intent to promote the use of
> the new unique abbreviations as the new local practice?

I don't think that would ever work; the global trend is to accept
diversity and multiplicity of locales. People would continue to refer
to timezones using abbreviations and names in their own languages and
character-sets (refer to recent posts by Andy Lipscomb re French
Canadians, and Peter Machata re Czech republic). Rather, the idea
would be to start with a baseline international standard of unique
abbreviations (and their text descriptions); each locale would have
locale-internal-unique localization strings corresponding to the
baseline. The result could allow international portability of computer
programs for timezone information similar to that which already exists
for gregorian month names and days of the weeks (using, in the case of
GNU/Linux, the GLIBC nl_langinfo() function ).

That I take it for granted the baseline will be in Latin characters
and English is just a consequence of that language's stature at this
point in history. Two thousand years ago, we would be e-mailing each
other in Greek.
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