[tz] Wrong name of timezone

Arthur David Olson arthurdavidolson at gmail.com
Mon Oct 25 17:59:10 UTC 2021


Here are the results of a Google ngrams search for frequencies of the
various spellings between 1700 and 1940:


https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Kiev%2CKyiv%2CKiou%2CKiow%2CKiew%2CKiiow%2CKieff&year_start=1700&year_end=1940&corpus=26&smoothing=3

    @dashdashado

On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 1:49 PM Paul Eggert via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> On 10/25/21 09:04, Pierpaolo Bernardi via tz wrote:
> > It is only a coincidence that the English name is more similar to
> russian than to Ukrainian.
>
> I doubt whether it's entirely coincidence, as the English-language
> spelling for the city was all over the map (so to speak) long ago, with
> spellings like Kiou, Kiow, Kiew, and Kiiow. In the 19th century the city
> was spelled "Kieff" as often as "Kiev" in English-language text, and
> surely this was because English speakers most often heard about the city
> from Russian speakers.
>
> You can see a similar effect in "Prague", the English-language name for
> the capital of the Czech Republic. English-speakers got that spelling
> from the French, and formerly pronounced it to rhyme with "vague" (a
> rhyme that still works in French, although most English-speakers would
> disagree nowadays).
>
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