On 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).
"Peking" is the Wade-Giles encoding of the Chinese phonetics; "Beijing" is the encoding in the current PRC system. Both encode the same phonetics. The difference is that the encoding of Wade-Giles is very strange and misleading, for example using the letter p to encode the sound b (the sound p is encoded by p'). Since most people don't know the aberrations of Wade-Giles, they may be mislead into thinking that the name of that city has changed. This is not so, but I suppose the misunderstanding is excusable. paul