Re: Looking for a standard on historical countries

From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:43:19 +0100

How is ths related to Unicode ?
May be it's associated to CLDR for former regional classifcation of
languages, but I doubt this will ever create any standardization for
historic data that should remain as is without changes in their old sources
for which there are no more any active maintainers, just interested people
(basically historians that may comment about them the way they want or
could invent their new terminology for analysts and archivists).
And there's no limit, but as proofs are disapearing there will be lot of
political issues with conflicting countries, and even before countres were
internationally regulated (before the creation of the Society of Nations
and later the United Nations) because they only existed by temporary mutual
agreements or were the result of wars (and even in that case, most
conquered areas were not fully controled by the theoretical rulers).
Additionally, maps severaly lacked the modern precision, names were not
standardized at all even in the same language, or within the same local
population, depending on contexts of use or the kind of people using them
(ecclesiastic institutions, states; parliaments, kings/queens/imperators or
their vassals, judges, merchants, farmers...

It is alread y difficult to build maps for today's countries. There's in
fact no rule in geography (every rule has its own exceptions, including
when we just count today's countries standardized by ISO and people still
disagreee about what is a country with the various forms of governments).

2014-10-31 16:29 GMT+01:00 Markus Scherer <markus.icu_at_gmail.com>:

> On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 6:20 AM, "Jörg Knappen" <jknappen_at_web.de> wrote:
>
>> Does someone here is aware of a standard or a de facto standard for names
>> or codes of historical countries? For the requirement I have in mind, all
>> countries where there was a printing press would be optimal coverage,
>> anything going beyond 1974 (ISO 3166-3) will be better than nothing.
>>
>
> I agree that that would be useful, but I am not aware of any such standard
> or reliable source of data.
>
> This question might be more successful on the cldr-users mailing list
> where people are more likely to think about region codes and display names.
> (http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html)
>
> markus
>
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> Unicode_at_unicode.org
> http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode
>
>

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Received on Fri Oct 31 2014 - 14:45:22 CDT

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