[tz] Change Turkey to Turkiye or not?

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Mon Jun 6 17:44:29 UTC 2022


On 6/6/22 10:00, Doug Ewell via tz wrote:
> 2. The identifier in the tz database which has by far the greatest visibility and relevance to users is "Europe/Istanbul", which avoids the issue altogether.

Yes, that's the most important thing. We dodged a bullet there. Even if 
Erdoğan's government starts asking English-language writers to switch to 
"İstanbul" we would need to decline, since Zone names like 
Europe/Istanbul are in ASCII.

As for commentary and auxiliary uses, Rule names (which are private to 
the database) have always been ASCII so "Türkiye" is dubious there, 
though I suppose we could change to "Turk" if needed to avoid 
unnecessary controversy about spelling "Turkey" vs "Turkiye". Also, 
iso3166.tab has the usual English spelling not the official UN spelling 
- for example, "Cape Verde" not "Cabo Verde" even though the UN spelling 
changed in 2013, so to treat "Türkiye"/"Turkey" consistently with "Cabo 
Verde"/"Cape Verde" we should wait a few years and see what happens.


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