On 2021-02-09 08:36:31 (+0800), Brian Inglis wrote:
On 2021-02-08 16:06, Philip Paeps wrote:
On 2021-02-09 06:31:22 (+0800), John Hawkinson wrote:
Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote on Mon, 8 Feb 2021 at 17:24:39 EST in <5428025b-2f3c-3e09-7594-37d8e135fbd7@cs.ucla.edu>:
The compromise proposal I made in November (see URL below) received only one comment <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2020-November/029568.html> , which suggested to not bother with a compromise and to just rename the entry then.
I did not reply to your compromise proposal because I thought it was clear from my prior input that I agreed with the idea that an interim compromise was pointless and summary renaming was appropriate. I suspect many others who expressed themselves before similarly did not offer their opinion, because it would feel like repetition.
(It was I who posted the only comment on Paul's proposal in November expressing a preference for summary renaming.)
Note that I am not opposed to the compromise proposal Paul suggested. Though my preference for summary renaming stands. It is clear that we will eventually have a Europe/Kyiv. We might as well get it over with. We have an established and reasonably exercised backward compatibility mechanism for people who need it. Trying out forward compatibility seems to provide few benefits.
I doubt any of these posters actually use software that displays Kiev: they have made no mention of products or projects, and have been told to spam this address! They could also be Russian provocateurs. How can we know they are Ukrainian, as it is useful if Russian controlled systems can maintain or masquerade as Ukrainian identities, used in media campaigns to their own ends?
This is clutching at straws. One of the most recent posts actually included a screenshot. As John Hawkinson pointed out elsewhere in this thread: we shouldn't merely dismiss these discussions simply because they happen so regularly.
Mumbai vs Bombay is the only name change I would consider commonly recognized by most English speakers, but Kolkata, Kyiv, etc. are not, and neither are most country and city renamings in recent decades, nor are they widely used when they appear in the press, often requiring their previous names to provide relevancy.
That may just be because Mumbai is much more likely to appear in the media most English speakers consume than Kolkata... Mumbai is the financial capital of India. It also has one of the largest international airports in the country. You're not very likely to encounter Kolkata in English-language press (or advertising) outside India unless there's big bad news.
[I still see widely recognized names such as Burma and Rangoon used in the popular press to explain what's going on in what's now called Myanmar, as few recognize the latter; people have no interest or care about what happens in countries whose names they no longer recognize. Languages and names are about communication and comprehension: change names if you want to hinder communication and comprehension, and interest and caring as consequences.]
While there may be some confusion about Burma/Myanmar and Rangoon/Yangon, the mental gap between Kiev and Kyiv is a lot narrower. Note that the most recent Godthab/Nuuk was a much more substantial burden on the Anglophone eye. The identifiers are largely an internal phenomenon. The only English speakers who really have to care are the maintainers of the tz database and the maintainers of software that consumes the tz database. One would hope that these folks can cope with the very occasional rename. I don't think anyone will accuse us of being cavalier about the stability of our identifiers. Philip -- Philip Paeps Senior Reality Engineer Alternative Enterprises