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Re: Alternative place names
by Paul Eggert Sept. 26, 2000

Sept. 26, 2000

Oscar van Vlijmen <o.van.vlijmen(a)tip.nl> writes: > Keep the current zone names because Thule and the other Danish names are > globally more common, keep the commented Inuit names, but change Pituffik to > Qaanaaq. However small Qaanaaq is, it refers to Thule; Pituffik refers to > the air base. The "Thule" entry refers to the airbase, not the town. Until recently, Thule was the only time zone region whose most populous location was an airbase. Even now the populations of the town and the airbase are neck and neck, so I'd leave it alone for now. However, I'll append "air base" to the comment, to make it clearer. > * Bhutan: the name of the capital is Thimphu, not Thimbu. Good point. By Altavista's count, "Thimphu" is now far more popular than "Thimbu" in English. I'll change this in my next proposed patch. > * Cambodia: Phnom Penh says the tz data, Phnum Penh is a more modern > transliteration. Altavista says that "Phnom Penh" is still more popular in English, by a wide, wide margin. So let's stick with it. (Besides, we can't put the accent over the "e" in a Posix name. :-) > * China: Chungking: seems to me an old and wrong French transliteration of > Chongqing; the q is not a k-sound, but a ts-sound. Chungking is the traditional English name; e.g. see <http://www.sinistra.net/els/sup/transcript.html>, which gives the following examples, among others: (Postal) (Pinyin) Canton Guangzhou Chungking Chongqing Hong Kong Xianggang Macao Aomen Peking Beijing Szechuan Sichuan Of these examples, I think "Beijing" is clearly more popular than "Peking" in English these days. At the other extreme is "Xianggang", which few English-speakers have ever heard of. "Chungking" is somewhere in the middle -- still more popular than the Pinyin name in movie titles (e.g. Chungking Express [1994], a movie made in Hong Kong) but less popular in, say, English-language travel web sites produced in the PRC. For now I'm slightly inclined to leave it as "Chungking" for a little while longer, but put "Chongqing" in as a comment. Similarly for the other Postal names. > * Cyprus: Nicosia. Isn't this called Lefkosia at the moment? That's news to me. I often see English-language news dispatches with a Nicosia dateline. Perhaps it depends on whether you're looking at the city from a European or an Asian viewpoint? I can just see it now: Europe/Nicosia as an alias for Asia/Lefkosia. (No, no, forget that I mentioned it. :-) > * Kazakhstan: Aqtau: could be a pre-1940 transliteration; since the Cyrillic > script was reused, the correct transliteration, according to the Times > atlas, is Aktau. The CIA spells it "Aqtau". The Times of Central Asia (the only online English-language newspaper in the area that I could find) also spells it "Aqtau"; see <http://www.times.kg/web-guide/kazakhstan/>. The Lonely Planet guide also calls it "Aqtau" (and I can't resist repeating its remark that the town is "for the perverse and JG Ballard lovers only"). But a lot of Russian-derived sources do indeed spell it "Aktau", and I think the oil companies tend to follow the Russians. Currently "Aktau" is present as a comment; I'm inclined to leave it that way for now. > Where on earth is Aqtobe? TZ data says it's in the > Aktyubinsk time zone. Since Aktyubinsk is on the map (both as an oblast' > name and as the capital of that county), why not change Aqtobe to > Aktyubinsk. Aktyubinsk is the old (Russian) name, and Aqtobe is the new (Kazakh) one. Google says "Aqtobe" is more popular these days (not surprising, as "Aktyubinsk" is a pain to spell :-). > * Kirgizstan: should be Kyrgyzstan. The official name indeed has "y" but I think "i" is quite popular in English. It's just a comment, so it doesn't matter all that much. I'll include both spellings in the comment. > * Laos: Vientiane. Put in a comment the better transliteration of Lao name: > Viangchan. > * Qatar: Al Dawhah: it's Ad Dawhah or the more Latin alternative Doha. > * Bahrain: no need for '-' in Al-Manamah, so: Al Manamah. > * Syria: Damascus; comment: Dimashq. Thanks; I'll add/fix these comments. > * Turkmenistan has since 1991 the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic. > I'm not sure if it's Ashkhabad or Ashgabat at the moment. Altavista says that Ashgabat is much more common, and the CIA uses Ashgabat. This looks like we should change the name too. > * Vietnam: tzdata says: Saigon's official name is Thanh-Pho Ho Chi Minh. How > nice, but isn't the capital Ha Noi? The fact that probably more Americans > actually have been in Saigon should not play any role ;) Ho Chi Minh City aka Saigon is far more populous than Hanoi, so that's why we use it. (Just as we use Los Angeles and not Sacramento. :-)

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Defense for Ho Chi Minh
by Jesper Nørgaard Sept. 26, 2000

Sept. 26, 2000

Oscar van Vlijmen wrote: ======================= * Vietnam: tzdata says: Saigon's official name is Thanh-Pho Ho Chi Minh. How nice, but isn't the capital Ha Noi? The fact that probably more Americans actually have been in Saigon should not play any role ;) ======================= I believe that tz data has an (unstated?) policy of defining the default city of a country not necessarily to be the capital, but the city with the highest number of inhabitants, as in the concrete example where Ho Chi Minh city has around 3 million inhabitants, whereas the capital Hanoi (or Ha Noi) has only 1 million inhabitants. That probably also explains why there has been more Americans in Saigon ... Regards, Jesper Nørgaard Email: jnorgard(a)Prodigy.Net.mx Programador/Analista CIMMYT - Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo Dirección: CIMMYT, Lisboa 27, 06600 Mexico, D.F. Tel.: +52 (5) 58-04-20-04 ext. 1374 Fax: +52 (5) 58-04-75-58 Tel. Casa: 53-10-05-95 ó 53-10-97-78 CIMMYT home page: http://cimmyt.cgiar.org Check out my Time Zone Converter: http://timezone50.homepage.com

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Peace Time
by Olson, Arthur David (NCI) Sept. 25, 2000

Sept. 25, 2000

The information provided by Garrett Wollman suggests the change below. Given the location of the international date line, the document was signed when it was 1945-09-01 in the United States. --ado *** 7.52/northamerica Mon Sep 25 16:29:52 2000 --- 7.53/northamerica Mon Sep 25 16:29:52 2000 *************** *** 1,4 **** ! # @(#)northamerica 7.52 # also includes Central America and the Caribbean # This data is by no means authoritative; if you think you know better, --- 1,4 ---- ! # @(#)northamerica 7.53 # also includes Central America and the Caribbean # This data is by no means authoritative; if you think you know better, *************** *** 58,67 **** --- 58,89 ---- # Before the Uniform Time Act of 1966 took effect in 1967, observance of # Daylight Saving Time in the US was by local option, except during wartime. + # From Arthur David Olson (2000-09-25): + # After the end of World War II, "Peace" replaced "War" in the time zone names + # used on at least some radio broadcasts. We'll assume this kicked in on the + # signing on 1945-09-02 of the document ending the war. According to + # <a href="http://spclevents.com/ships/missouri/bb63_pod.html"> + # http://spclevents.com/ships/missouri/bb63_pod.html + # </a> + # sunrise was 05:14 and sunset was 18:07; according to + # <a href="http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/wwii-pac/japansur/js-8g.htm" > + # http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/wwii-pac/japansur/js-8g.htm + # </a> + # "All signatures were in place by 9:22." According to the United States + # Naval Observatory's Astronomical Aplications Department's Sunrise and Sunset + # Calculator, + # <a href="http://aa.usno.navy.mil/AA"> + # http://aa.usno.navy.mil/AA + # </a> + # sunrise at 35o42'N, 139o46'E on 1945-09-02 was at 05:13 and sunset was at + # 18:08; these values are close enough to 05:14 and 18:07 to let us know that + # the Missouri was operating on Tokyo time. + # Rule NAME FROM TO TYPE IN ON AT SAVE LETTER/S Rule US 1918 1919 - Mar lastSun 2:00 1:00 W # War Rule US 1918 1919 - Oct lastSun 2:00 0 S Rule US 1942 only - Feb 9 2:00 1:00 W # War + Rule US 1945 only - Sep 2 0:22u 1:00 P # Peace Rule US 1945 only - Sep 30 2:00 0 S Rule US 1967 max - Oct lastSun 2:00 0 S Rule US 1967 1973 - Apr lastSun 2:00 1:00 D

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Eastern Peace Time
by Olson, Arthur David (NCI) Sept. 25, 2000

Sept. 25, 2000

Last night I heard part of a rebroadcast of a 1945 Arch Oboler radio drama. In the introduction, Oboler spoke of "Eastern Peace Time." An AltaVista search turned up http://rowayton.org/rhs/hstaug45.html by way of confirmation. The "northamerica" time zone file already has information about Eastern War Time during World War II... Rule US 1942 only - Feb 9 2:00 1:00 W # War Rule US 1945 only - Sep 30 2:00 0 S ...and presumably what's needed is a line between these two such as... Rule US 1945 only - Sep 2 h:mmu 1:00 P # Peace ...where h:mm is the time that the document ending the war was signed. And so, two questions: 1. What are the correct values for h and mm above? 2. Was that indeed the instant when the switch from War Time to Peace Time occurred? Thanks in advance for any light that folks can shed! --ado

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Re: (Cyprus), Nicosia is in Europe not Asia.
by Paul Eggert Sept. 25, 2000

Sept. 25, 2000

Paul Hill <phill(a)myriad.com> writes: > But I believe the tzdata actually redundantly lists some entries. > If I recall, the US territories in the Pacific (Guam?, American Samoa?) are > listed in two files but with the same IDs. There are many redundancies if you look at the "backward" file, since it contains backward-compatibility links for older names like US/Pacific that have been superseded by newer names like America/Los_Angeles. But if you omit the "backward" file, almost all redundancies are where two different locations have the same time zone history since 1970 (e.g. Europe/Rome and Europe/San_Marino). These redundancies are needed only to satisfy the rule that each country gets at least one location. There is only one exception to this general rule: Istanbul has the two entries Europe/Istanbul and Asia/Istanbul. I think this is OK, as Istanbul actually does span continents. I don't know of any current official dividing line between Europe and Asia, or between Asia and Africa for that matter, so I suppose there could be more points of controversy in the distant future as the dividing line encounters time zone splits. Maybe by then there will be a standard, or we'll use a different naming scheme. As for Cyprus, the tz database generally tries to avoid political and cultural questions, as they are distractions from its intended purpose. Culturally, Cyprus is more European than Asian (and has been so for most of its history); but if we went by culture, we'd have to do things like putting Australia under Europe and this wouldn't make much sense from a time zone point of view. Geographically, Cyprus is clearly in Asia, and this has long been recognized. For example, please see Herodotus, Histories, I.72.

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Re: Greenland - places
by Paul Eggert Sept. 25, 2000

Sept. 25, 2000

Oscar van Vlijmen <o.van.vlijmen(a)tip.nl> writes: > Why not using the Greenlandic place names in the Europe file? When I originally chose the names, the old-fashioned Danish names were in more common use in English than the newfangled Greenlandic names. This may have changed since then; I haven't checked. > Thule: Qaanaaq At the height of the cold war, Thule had maybe 10,000 people in it (the exact number was a secret); it was a giant city by Greenland's standards. But now the nearby native village is a bit larger than Thule itself. I think this explains why some sources refer to Thule as `Qaanaaq' and others `Pituffik'. If we rename Thule, we'll have to pick the right replacement name. By the tz rules we should still stick with Thule, as I think it's still much better known in English; but this may change in the future, I suppose. It's even conceivable that Thule will become a ghost town. > Godthåb (or even worse: Godthab, yes I know, Posix 1.0): Nuuk > Scoresbysund: Ittoqqortoormiit Nuuk would be an good name, but Ittoqqortoormiit is too long; it exceeds 14 chars. (Maybe we could remove all the duplicate letters. :-) > If one doesn't like those names as zone names, just add them as a comment > (#). That has already been done in the latest tz sources. > Especially Ittoqqortoormiit could be a bit problematic. Although this is the > official spelling as far as I can tell, I already found two other spellings, > one of them was an error (Ittoqqortoormiut) and another was probably the > wrong Inuit dialect (Itseqqortoormiit). In the current tz comment, it's a different spelling yet: Ittoqqortoormit. I'll change the spelling to agree with the Danish postal code web page. But this is another hint that perhaps we should leave the tz Zone names alone, at least for now.

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RE: Greenland - places
by Olson, Arthur David (NCI) Sept. 21, 2000

Sept. 21, 2000

> Why not using the Greenlandic place names in the Europe file? >From the "Theory" file: Use traditional English spelling, e.g. prefer `Rome' to `Roma', and prefer `Athens' to the true name (which uses Greek letters). The Posix file name restrictions encourage this rule. --ado

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Population counters
by Jesper Nørgaard Sept. 19, 2000

Sept. 19, 2000

Now that we had a request about Latitude and Longitude sources, I was just wondering if anybody knows sources in internet about population counters for cities. I have made many different searches, but apparently not the right ones, because I have only come up with 2 important ones: UN list of capital cities and cities of 100,000 inhabitants and more http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/demog/ctry.htm Statistics pages for the world: http://www.xist.org/ If you think this is not that relevant for the tz list, I probably agree, but some of you guys have plenty of background in the geographic area in general, so I have a feeble hope that somebody could help me out. Regards, Jesper Nørgaard Email: jnorgard(a)Prodigy.Net.mx Programador/Analista CIMMYT - Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo Dirección: CIMMYT, Lisboa 27, 06600 Mexico, D.F. Tel.: +52 (5) 58-04-20-04 ext. 1374 Fax: +52 (5) 58-04-75-58 Tel. Casa: 53-10-05-95 ó 53-10-97-78 CIMMYT home page: http://cimmyt.cgiar.org Check out my Time Zone Converter: http://timezone50.homepage.com

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Greenland - places
by Oscar van Vlijmen Sept. 17, 2000

Sept. 17, 2000

Why not using the Greenlandic place names in the Europe file? Thule: Qaanaaq Godthåb (or even worse: Godthab, yes I know, Posix 1.0): Nuuk Scoresbysund: Ittoqqortoormiit Source: e.g. "Postal codes in Greenland" (http://www.dpc.dk/Guide/PostalCodes.html) and "POSTNUMRE Danmark/København/Grønland/Færøerne" (http://www.morslink.dk/postnr.htm) If one doesn't like those names as zone names, just add them as a comment (#). Especially Ittoqqortoormiit could be a bit problematic. Although this is the official spelling as far as I can tell, I already found two other spellings, one of them was an error (Ittoqqortoormiut) and another was probably the wrong Inuit dialect (Itseqqortoormiit). Oscar van Vlijmen 2000-09-17

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Locations
by Oscar van Vlijmen Sept. 16, 2000

Sept. 16, 2000

Find the latitude and longitude of more than a million (!) of locations on earth with: Astrodienst: http://www.astro.ch/atlas/ (service for astrologers) Heavens-Above: http://www.heavens-above.com/countries.asp (service for astronomers) Oscar van Vlijmen 2000-09-16

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