On 04/01/2015 06:40 AM, Dzmitry Kazimirchyk wrote:
MSK stands for first three consonants of word Moscow transliterated from Russian (MoSKva)
I'm not sure about that theory. If it were so, the English-language abbreviation would be "MSC", not "MSK", since English text almost invariably uses the spelling "Moscow". And that theory wouldn't explain "MSD" either. I expect the actual etymology was more complicated. Regardless of the original etymology, in English "MSK" is a more-natural acronym for Minsk than it is for Moscow, and it has the advantage of being recognized as an alias for UTC+3 by a reasonably large set of software already (which is unwise, but there it is). The tz database is already on record as saying that time zone abbreviations are ambiguous and that software cannot reliably infer UTC offsets from the time zone abbreviations (e.g., "IST" stands for both India and Israel standard time). The ambiguity of "MSK" is merely about location, not about both location and UTC offset, so it is more benign than ambiguities that have longstanding precedents in the database.