[tz] Wrong name of timezone

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Mon Oct 25 17:48:56 UTC 2021


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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