I searched "(kiev OR kyiv) site:____" with various English-language news sites on Google News, and sorted each result by date to get a recent article which referred specifically to the Ukrainian capital: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/15/opinion/mikheil-saakashvi li-ukraine-russia.html 2017-12-15: "After students were beaten in Kiev’s central square…" http://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/tn-wknd-et-kuz in-20171124-story.html 2017-11-24: "…knew it was time to leave his home of Kiev, Ukraine." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/corr uption-makes-ukraine-even-more-vulnerable-to-russia/2017/12/ 14/5c0e3122-df6a-11e7-bbd0-9dfb2e37492a_story.html 2017-12-14: "Kiev has been the scene of a somewhat farcical drama this month…" http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/24/politics/paul-manafort-russia/index.html 2017-11-25: "…obtained from a government source in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev." https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/ukraine-s-lgbtq-sold iers-hope-their-service-will-change-hearts-n822291 2017-11-28: "…March for Equality, an LGBTQ event in Kiev…" http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/12/15/reporters-notebook-p utins-talk-thon-experience-like-no-other.html 2017-12-15: "…don’t want what has happened in Kiev to happen in their cities." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2017/12/15/gerard-pique- sometimes-criticised-say-not-worried/ 2017-12-15: "…the final of the Champions League in Kiev in May…" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/08/ukrainian-poli ce-recapture-former-georgian-president-saakashvili 2017-12-08: "…the opposition leader had been detained by police in Kiev…" http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42289481 2017-12-09: "…was dragged from his home in Kiev and arrested." https://news.sky.com/story/ex-georgia-president-mikheil-saak ashvili-broken-free-from-police-custody-11157379 2017-12-05: "…an apartment in the capital Kiev…" http://www.smh.com.au/world/paul-manafort-and-russian-collea gue-ghostwrote-editorial-special-counsel-20171204-gzyrbx.html 2017-12-05: "…ran Manafort's office in Kiev…" http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-06/ukraine-protesters-fre es-former-georgian-president-after-arrest/9230676 2017-12-05: "The turmoil in Kiev is just the latest challenge for the Ukrainian Government…" Indeed, it seems these major English-language news outlets almost universally use "Kiev" to this day, except when the place name is used as part of a different proper noun, such as when referring to the *Kyiv Post* <https://www.kyivpost.com/>. It's even in the BBC News style guide to use "Kiev" and not "Kyiv": http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/article/art20130702112133537 Although several of these outlets have written articles on the differences in orthography over the years, until there is enough common usage of "Kyiv" in the English language that a significant number of these outlets decide to switch, it is reasonable to say that "Kiev" remains the generally-accepted English spelling despite certain governmental recognitions of "Kyiv". But this is not the venue for that discussion. -- Tim Parenti On 15 December 2017 at 14:19, 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.
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