Re: [tz] Bangladesh's TZ Abbreviation
I noticed other non-bd sites with BdST. None of the sites (for either code) seem persuasively authoritative. References to BST are 1-off references, whereas the news site uses BdST consistently, but it's just one site. I notice that Wikipedia has been using BdST for some time. (Not that I'm saying it's a good source, and it didn't cite its references). I suggest that the lack of good references is maybe because Bengali doesn't use the Latin script? I can understand why someone may want to distinguish their abbreviation from BST though. What has been the past policy for determining these abbreviations? Particularly for non-Latin scripts, &/or where it may be difficult for us to find, read, &/or transliterate any native-language sources? -Shawn
On 01/18/13 09:54, Shawn Steele wrote:
What has been the past policy for determining these abbreviations? Particularly for non-Latin scripts
The tz database uses English and ASCII, so (for example) even if the most common name for the time in mainland China is "北京时间", we can't use that in the tz database. Instead, we use "CST", which is short for the English phrase "China Standard Time". Similarly, for Bangladesh we can't use "বাংলাদেশ মান সময়" or an abbreviation, since that's not ASCII, so we need to use some abbreviation for "Bangladesh Standard Time". We try to look for the real-world consensus, which often involves looking at both official sources as well as unofficial but reliable sources such as newspapers that publish at least partly in English. There's no hard and fast rule here, but the basic idea is that we're trying to reflect common practice, not prescribe it.
On Jan 18, 12:27pm, eggert@cs.ucla.edu (Paul Eggert) wrote: -- Subject: Re: [tz] Bangladesh's TZ Abbreviation | On 01/18/13 09:54, Shawn Steele wrote: | > What has been the past policy for determining these abbreviations? | > Particularly for non-Latin scripts | | The tz database uses English and ASCII, so (for example) even if | the most common name for the time in mainland China is "北京时间", Windows appears to be able to handle non ascii timezone names(*), does anyone know if their database has any localized timezone names? christos (*)http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms725481%28VS.85%29.aspx
We have localized display names for 3 variations of the name, eg: "(UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)", "Pacific Standard Time" and "Pacific Daylight Time" could all be translated into whatever shows up in the drop-down. -Shawn -----Original Message----- From: Christos Zoulas [mailto:christos@zoulas.com] Sent: Friday, January 18, 2013 12:50 PM To: Paul Eggert; Shawn Steele Cc: tz@iana.org Subject: Re: [tz] Bangladesh's TZ Abbreviation On Jan 18, 12:27pm, eggert@cs.ucla.edu (Paul Eggert) wrote: -- Subject: Re: [tz] Bangladesh's TZ Abbreviation | On 01/18/13 09:54, Shawn Steele wrote: | > What has been the past policy for determining these abbreviations? | > Particularly for non-Latin scripts | | The tz database uses English and ASCII, so (for example) even if the | most common name for the time in mainland China is "北京时间", Windows appears to be able to handle non ascii timezone names(*), does anyone know if their database has any localized timezone names? christos (*)http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms725481%28VS.85%29.aspx
On 1/18/2013 3:50 PM, Christos Zoulas wrote:
Windows appears to be able to handle non ascii timezone names(*), does anyone know if their database has any localized timezone names?
I remember I helped someone on IRC once with timezone abbreviations (in mingw) not coming out right because the name was localized into Spanish. So it appears so... though, I'm not sure how reliable those are, when they're scarcely ever displayed to the user, and often are nonsense even in English ["US Eastern Standard Time" refers to their equivalent of America/Indianapolis] Anyway, they don't do abbreviations. Even the MSVCRT _tzname variable uses the full name when the timezone comes from the system settings (though it will use an abbreviation when one is present in the posix-style TZ environment variable, of course)
participants (4)
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christos＠zoulas.com -
Paul Eggert -
Random832 -
Shawn Steele