Myanmar's former capital and most populous city is currently known as Yangon. In 1989 Burma was renamed Myanmar (which you have reflected in the Asia data file). At the same time, Rangoon was renamed Yangon, which is currently not reflected in the codebase. http://www.forbestravelguide.com/yangon-myanmar/whats-the-difference-between... . -- David Massoud http://lnked.in/DavidMassoud
On 09/07/2016 07:09 PM, David Massoud wrote:
Myanmar's former capital and most populous city is currently known as Yangon.
When the Asia/Rangoon entry was created in 1993, "Rangoon" was by far the most common name in English. Nowadays, my Google web searches yield about 31 million hits for "Yangon" and about 10 million for "Rangoon", and my Google News searches yield about 220 thousand for "Yangon" and about 74 thousand for "Rangoon". Bing searches are also lopsided, though not quite by the same margin (7.4 millon for "Yangon", 3.0 million for "Rangoon"). Although Google Book searches for 21st-century books yield only 20 web pages' worth of hits for "Yangon" vs 25 pages for "Rangoon", the discrepancy seems to be due mostly to history books. These popularity measure should be taken with a grain of salt, and we wouldn't change merely if it were now a horse race. That being said, it does seem now like Yangon is now by far the predominant name in English and that it's time to change the tz zone name. Proposed patch attached.
participants (2)
-
David Massoud -
Paul Eggert