[tz] Kyiv

[Paul.Koning at dell.com]

> On Dec 15, 2017, at 2:19 PM, Garrett Wollman <wollman at csail.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> <<On Fri, 15 Dec 2017 11:32:03 +0100, "Philip Paeps" <philip at trouble.is> said:
> 
>> Note that we do not have a "Europe/Koebenhavn" or a "Europe/Lefkosia" - 
>> to pick two examples of transliterations of local names that are 
>> different from the names of the cities in English.  We have a 
>> "Europe/Copenhagen" and the "Europe/Nicosia".
> 
> Contrast the case (which thankfully we do not have to deal with) of
> the capital city of the People's Republic of China.  In English, it
> used to be called "Peking", and in fact in the name of the university
> and of the duck dish it still is.  The PRC government made a concerted
> campaign to change the name used by English speakers to be "Beijing",
> which is a phonetic representation of the name of the city in Mandarin
> (putonghua).  

"Peking" is the Wade-Giles encoding of the Chinese phonetics; "Beijing" is the encoding in the current PRC system.  Both encode the same phonetics.  The difference is that the encoding of Wade-Giles is very strange and misleading, for example using the letter p to encode the sound b (the sound p is encoded by p').

Since most people don't know the aberrations of Wade-Giles, they may be mislead into thinking that the name of that city has changed.  This is not so, but I suppose the misunderstanding is excusable.

	paul