On Fri, Dec 15, 2017 at 2:19 PM, Garrett Wollman <wollman@csail.mit.edu> wrote:

<<On Fri, 15 Dec 2017 11:32:03 +0100, "Philip Paeps" <philip@trouble.is> said:

> Note that we do not have a "Europe/Koebenhavn" or a "Europe/Lefkosia" -
> to pick two examples of transliterations of local names that are
> different from the names of the cities in English. We have a
> "Europe/Copenhagen" and the "Europe/Nicosia".

Contrast the case (which thankfully we do not have to deal with) of
the capital city of the People's Republic of China. In English, it
used to be called "Peking", and in fact in the name of the university
and of the duck dish it still is. The PRC government made a concerted
campaign to change the name used by English speakers to be "Beijing",
which is a phonetic representation of the name of the city in Mandarin
(putonghua). This has to a very large extent worked, and now most
English texts say "Beijing" and not "Peking" (although many people
still don't pronounce it "correctly" because the letters in hanyu
pinyin don't have the same sound values as they do in English).
However, in many languages *other than English*, the name of the city
has not changed -- AFAIK it's still "Pékin" in French, for example.

Note that the name in Chinese ("Northern Capitol" ) did not change - this was not politics so much as an attempt

to spur the adoption of a new transliteration scheme. Peiping = Peking = Beijing in the original.

Regards

Marshall

So the lesson here is that, if the Ukrainian people (or their
government) earnestly want to change how the name of their capital
city is written by English speakers, they're going to have to do a way
more effective job at lobbying the people who actually shape how
English speakers use words -- especially the mass media. The tz
database is descriptive and lobbying its maintainers will not have the
desired effect.

-GAWollman