[tz] Rename Ukrainian cities to their official transliterated names

David Patte dpatte at relativedata.com
Fri Oct 5 15:29:01 UTC 2018


Very good summary of the issue. Thank you.

Yes, I would agree that for those that state they have issues with these 
names, they appear incorrect or humiliating - whether that was the 
intent or not.


On 2018-10-03 17:13, Volodymyr Kostyrko wrote:
> 03.10.18 20:46, Guy Harris wrote:
>> On Oct 3, 2018, at 10:04 AM, Tim Parenti <tim at timtimeonline.com> wrote:
>>
>>> In particular, the spellings in current use by this project 
>>> generally remain much more common in English-language media.  This 
>>> project attempts to reflect mainstream English-language spellings 
>>> for place names (see theory.html), and explicitly does not attempt 
>>> to reflect transliterations.
>>
>> And, again, for the 5 trillionth time:
>>
>> If a user interface shows the tzdb region names to most end users and 
>> requires most end users to set the tzdb region by selecting from a 
>> list of tzdb region names - and this includes names generated from 
>> tzdb region names, e.g. "helpfully" using "Los Angeles" in the 
>> "America" region rather than "America/Los_Angeles" to select the US 
>> Pacific time zone - it is not a good user interface.
>>
>> Those names are identifiers for software use, just as LANG 
>> environment variable settings such as en_US.UTF-8 are identifiers for 
>> software use, *not* names that most end users should have to deal 
>> with, so making the names "look appropriate" is not the highest 
>> priority.
>>
>
> I must admit that you are right. But the point is that this is not the 
> final position everyone can agree with.
>
> Taking PHP community as a an example they are using raw zone names in 
> their configuration files. If any thirdparty vendor would try to 
> translate this zones in his application he will face a choice - to be 
> correct about zone naming according to each language or to forfeit 
> correctness in favor of clear and unambiguous configuration. And he 
> should choose the latter. I can't blame him neither.
>
> Renaming things others depend upon is also a very sloppy path that 
> shouldn't being followed so easily. Though this raises a problem 
> similar to "master-and-slave" concept. Most people are feeling fine 
> with the names as they are just a hollow words that mean nothing to 
> them, though for a very limited number of people who faced slavery or 
> humiliation this will be just a trigger and they will not stop 
> fighting to make everyone else stop treating this words as "normal" 
> and not "shameful". Most of you feel nothing about Kiev/Kyiv 
> difference, but for a lot of Ukrainians the former is a sign of a 
> communist slavery, the mark of alien possession over they father's 
> land. Leaving things as they are will not solve the problem for them, 
> and they wouldn't stop trying to change it. That's politics. Even if 
> you try to stay unbiased and techy you have to choose something, and 
> this choice will make your side.
>
> Probably this can be easily solved by scrapping full town names and 
> switching to some indices like UAK/UAZ/UAU but that's totally out of 
> the scope of my knowledge of tz database rules and principles. And 
> also in this case I'm a biased person. Totally not for me to decide.
>
> Thank you.
>



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