zone.tab corrections

Andy McDonald andy_tz at stemhaus.com
Tue May 29 12:36:00 UTC 2007


Paul Eggert wrote:
>> Ukrainian time zones Europe/Kiev, Europe/Uzhgorod and Europe/Zaporozhye:
>> These might better be named Europe/Kyiv, Europe/Uzhhorod and
>> Europe/Zaporizhia, being transliterations of the Ukrainian - rather than
>> Russian - place-names.
> 
> The tz database prefers the most common English spelling for the place
> names in question; this is why we use "Moscow" rather than "Moskva",
> for example.  "Kiev" is more popular than "Kyiv" in English.  The
> other two names are similar.  If the English spellings change (which
> is what happened with Mongolian and Kazakh names) we can revisit this.
> In the meantime, I can add some comments about this, and change the
> zone.tab entry to look like the following (a similar solution is
> already in place for Greenland locations):
> 
> UA	+4750+03510	Europe/Zaporozhye	Zaporozh'ye, E Lugansk / Zaporizhia, E Luhansk

Makes sense to me. For want of a better metric, Google shows more
(English-only, modified in the last year) results for Uzhgorod than
Uzhhorod and more results for Zaporozhye than Zaporizhia. For
sufficiently obscure places, though, a most common English spelling must
be very hard to establish.

I guess the interesting thing about Kiev/Kyiv is that Ukraine wishes the
English spelling to be 'Kyiv', although 'Kiev' is of course much more
widely used.



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