Taiwan (Asia/Taipei) Abbrevation
TZDB uses the abbreviations CST and CDT for Taiwan (Asia/Taipei), CDT last being observed in 1979. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Taiwan:...the government on Taiwan now favors the term National Standard Time (國家標準時間) as official use. Along with the governmental standard, popular alternatives include Taiwan Standard Time (臺灣標準時間), Taipei Time (臺北時間) and Formosan Time (寶島時間)... Should we update the current abbreviation to either NST or TST? CST doesn't seem right. I'm asking on behalf of a user of moment-timezone (a JS library that imports TZDB) who requested this here: https://github.com/moment/moment-timezone/issues/282 Thanks,Matt
Matt Johnson wrote:
Should we update the current abbreviation to either NST or TST? CST doesn't seem right.
This is an area where no abbreviation is perfect. As I understand it part of the confusion is that although CST typically stands for China Standard Time in international English, in Taiwan among the few people who care about these things in English it also stands for Chungyuan Standard Time, which is partly a Wade-Giles romanization of, and partly an English translation of, "中原時區" ("Central Plain Standard Time"); this is what the Nationalist government called the UTC+8 time zone that was partly implemented in China before 1949. This latter, more-specialized use of CST was never intended in the tz database. So, although from the point of view of a Taiwanese time nerd the abbreviation "CST" may seem politically obsolete, from an international viewpoint "CST" is still a quite common abbreviation. We are concerned only with English-language abbreviations. Of course if usage changes the abbreviation should too (that is what happened with Australia). That being said, in looking at what is published in English-language books and so forth, my impression is that "CST" still predominates, if only due to inertia. I'm a fan of inertia.
On 2015-12-26 13:03, Matt Johnson wrote:
TZDB uses the abbreviations CST and CDT for Taiwan (Asia/Taipei), CDT last being observed in 1979.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Taiwan: /...the government on Taiwan now favors the term National Standard Time (國家標準時間) as official use. Along with the governmental standard, popular alternatives include Taiwan Standard Time (臺灣標準時間), Taipei Time (臺北時間) and Formosan Time (寶島時間).../
Should we update the current abbreviation to either NST or TST? CST doesn't seem right. I'm asking on behalf of a user of moment-timezone (a JS library that imports TZDB) who requested this here: https://github.com/moment/moment-timezone/issues/282
Standard answer to this is - it is a localization issue, which can be dealt with using e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Obj... which allows for a short timezone entry, and could support e.g. en_TW.UTF-8 as well as zh_Hant_TW.UTF-8. -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
participants (3)
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Brian Inglis -
Matt Johnson -
Paul Eggert