[tz] 1 s error in America/Adak and America/Nome

Tim Parenti tim at timtimeonline.com
Wed Jun 14 17:15:59 UTC 2017


On 14 June 2017 at 03:17, Michael Deckers via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

>    Is "kept American time" supposed to imply that Americans
>    in Sitka did not use the same days of the week as the
>    Russians? That would be hard to believe and certainly
>    would need some evidence.
>

It's not hard to believe at all.  By that point, the discrepancies between
the Julian and Gregorian calendars and the concept of the International
Date Line were fairly well-known amongst those who needed to be so
concerned, even if the latter was still fairly ill-defined at the time.
It's reasonable that those in Sitka needed to be somewhat more aware of
these concerns than was otherwise typical, and that those who actively
needed to deal with two separate systems simply went about doing so.  Given
the communications of the era, this probably actually affected very few
people; however, where Russians and Americans may have been co-mingled, a
higher proportion would likely at least be aware of the existence of two
systems.

The modern-day comparisons with how people communicate amongst themselves
in areas near time zone boundaries and ambiguous areas are plentiful.  This
one's just a question of figuring the correct local date for any given
purpose, instead of the correct local time.

"Any given purpose" is key here.  The syntactic answers can vary depending
on who you ask and why; the important thing is coordination by means of
semantic agreement.  And that's a much broader and older concept that tz
can't really aim to cover fully.

--
Tim Parenti
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