Looking for a standard on historical countries

[Richard Wordingham]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2014 20:43:19 +0100
Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> How is ths related to Unicode ?

One possibility is though the Regional Indicators, but they are defined
by the unstable ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes.   

> 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).

A lot of useful historic information is missing from CLDR.  For example,
I believe line-breaking and word-boundary rules are completely missing
for 'Sumero-Akkadian' Cuneiform writing systems.  The rules were not
uniform.  On the other hand, an entry for the Assyrian for 'English' as
used in the Assyrian homeland would be meaningless. 

The precise territory covered by a country is not useful within the
Unicode domains, nor are debates about independence, nor whether tribute
was paid regularly.  In general, a more useful division may be by date,
but that is barely covered by a system designed for present-day
languages.

If this thread is of to be of any immediate use, what is the intended
use of the information?

Richard.