Quoth Paul Eggert on Tue, Sep 26, 2000:
Oscar van Vlijmen <o.van.vlijmen@tip.nl> writes:
* China: Chungking: seems to me an old and wrong French transliteration of Chongqing; the q is not a k-sound, but a ts-sound.
In Mandarin, it sounds more like 'ch' to me.
Chungking is the traditional English name;
(Postal) (Pinyin) Chungking Chongqing
"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.
I just asked a Chinese guy, who says that Chongqing is the official transliteration used in China. So maybe we should go with the Chinese government.
Szechuan Sichuan
Szechuan is food, not place.
* Kirgizstan: should be Kyrgyzstan.
The official name indeed has "y" but I think "i" is quite popular in English.
'i' and 'y' are different sounds, at least in Russian. Kirgizia and Kirgizstan are Russian names, Kyrgyzstan is Kyrgyzian (Kirgizian?).
* 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.
Yes, probably. It's Turkmenian name.
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. :-)
However, Asia/Jerusalem and not Asia/Tel_Aviv is the official time zone for Israel. Vadik. -- Avoid reality at all costs.