From: Markus Kuhn <mskuhn@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 01:49:23 +0200 (MET DST) The time zone in which Germany is located is called by a German law "Mitteleuropaeische Zeit (MEZ)" in winter and "Mitteleuropaeische Sommerzeit (MESZ)" in summer. This is a delicate area in the current zoneinfo database. The stated general rule is to use traditional English names for cities and time zones. This means that the America/Montreal entry has an English name and has entries that say `EST', even though many Montreal inhabitants no doubt would prefer a French name with entries that say `HNE'. The justifications for this policy in zoneinfo are: * fewer heated discussions * Ascii compatibility * far fewer entries are required; e.g. there's no need to distinguish America/Montreal from America/Toronto, not to mention Europe/Rome vs Europa/Roma It would be nice to have an internationalized zoneinfo database that contained names and time zone abbreviations in other languages, but such a database would have to address the above problems, and it'll take some work to design and promote it. In the mean time, the normal phrase used for ``Mitteleuropa'' in English is ``Central Europe'', so I would expect the most natural English translation of ``Mitteleuropaeische Zeit (MEZ)'' to be ``Central European Time (CET)''. Do you have any formal reference why "Central European Time" is any more correct than "Middle European Time"? Another delicate area in the zoneinfo database is the question of de facto versus de jure names for things. There's no stated policy here, but given that zoneinfo is not authoritative, I suggest that zoneinfo should adopt the OED's approach and describe actual usage, not official usage. For example, in the matter of ``Irish Summer Time'' vs ``British Summer Time'', our best evidence so far is the opinion of an Irish Government Secretary that `IST' is correct; but if we were to obtain a comprehensive study of actual usage showing that most English-speaking people say `BST' not `IST' for summer time in the state of Ireland, then I would say that the study is stronger evidence still, and that we should keep `BST' in the database. What does this mean for `CET' versus `MET'? Well, Alta Vista reports about 500 hits for "Central European Time" on the Web, but only 61 hits for "Middle European Time". My impression from reading the a few of the hits is that "Middle European Time" often appears from back-translation from the zoneinfo database, whereas "Central European Time" is more common among the majority of people who aren't familiar with zoneinfo in particular or Unix in general. So it appears that there's a strong case for `CET' over `MET' in real-world usage.