On 1/28/21 1:20 PM, Yaroslav Bilko wrote:
Ukraine started a official campaign ( https://mfa.gov.ua/news/67521-correctua-mzs-ukrajini-zvertajetysya-do-svitu-... ) some time ago to show other countries and mass media that Kyiv is only one true name.
Thanks, we're aware of the renaming effort, and this has been a periodic source of discussion on the tz mailing list. I recently proposed a transition plan for Europe/Kiev → Europe/Kyiv here: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2020-November/029542.html and I suggest you review that email thread. There's no rush; tzdb tends to move slowly about these things, due to software compatibility concerns. By the way, the choice of spelling should not be important to end users, as the tzdb spelling is not intended to be visible to them. End users should see their preferred spelling which would typically be Київ, but could also be Kyiv, Kænugarður, Κίεβο, 基輔, or whatever else is appropriate for the user's locale. The Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) is a good source for these localized names; see <http://cldr.unicode.org/>. If your software application is exposing the string "Europe/Kiev" to users who prefer a different name, please send bug reports mentioning CLDR to the application's developers. Thanks.
many people say "Kiev" even in Ukraine, but their number is getting down very fast.
This is off-topic, but I'm curious about the pronunciation. I assume your "Kiev" refers to Russian pronunciation. I'm concerned more about pronunciation in English and in Ukrainian. Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyiv#cite_note-12> says the English-language pronunciation is "/ˈkiːɛv, -ɛf, kiːˈɛv, -ˈɛf/ KEE-ev, -ef, kee-EV, -EF, US also /kiːv/ KEEV" (what a mess, huh?) whereas the Ukrainian pronunciation is simply [ˈkɪjiu̯] with this audio transcription: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Uk-Київ.ogg Is that accurate? If so, English-language speakers aren't pronouncing the name very closely to Ukrainian even with the "Kyiv" spelling, and I'm wondering how to explain proper Ukrainian pronunciation to English-language speakers. Should I say that one should pronounce "v" as if it were "oo", for example? Also, there are several dialects of Ukrainian, such as middle Dnieprian and central Polissian. Do these dialects all pronounce the city's name roughly the same, or are there significant variants? Is the Wikipedia audio middle Dnieprian, for example?