[OT] Re: Looking for a standard on historical countries

[Philippe Verdy]

Attention ! You've only isted the catalog entry, but not the actua reference
http://www.boutique.afnor.org/norme/xp-z44-002/code-pour-la-representation-des-noms-de-pays-historiques/article/748631/fa046190

Which gives information about context of use (mainly for bibliographic
purpose, not for linguistic/terminologic purpose) and with a limited
timeframe (starting from 1815 up to but excluding current countries encoced
in ISO 3166-1 and their divisions).

The standard was not even considered for international use, each national
library may have its own classification system, notably for important
legislation texts still applicable (such as international treaties or
treaties of union and ratifiation instruments thar were used for creating
or modifyng the territory of the current country, or about countries for
which another third party country is maintaining an official copy in its
official archives, a copy that can be enforced in front of existing
international courts; but that will be kept for an indefinite time unless
all ratifying parties have agreed to obsolete these texts).

And there are a lot of very old treties or bilateral agreements around the
world which are still enforcable even if the countries have changed their
poitical regime and a successor was designated (e.g. there are old treaties
from the Kingdom of France ratified and deposited in other EUropean
countries with specific clauses which are against the standard national law
but still applicable in their area; and it was not in the interest of the
Republic after the revolution to cancel these treaties with the risk of
splitting the territory; under national rules the Constitution protects all
international treaties ratified by France of whose the French Republic is
recognized as a successor, sometimes with a shared succession in some
regions).

These old enforcable texts are very complex to classify and it's normal for
a country to organize this with a national standard for its official
libraries. Beside this, those countries also have their own team of
historians in public research departments and universities and there are
needs also for genealogists for today's private successions and it's
important of being able to locate and retrieve these old documents.





2014-11-01 18:28 GMT+01:00 Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org>:

> Jörg Knappen <jknappen at web dot de> wrote:
>
> There was a French experimental standard, AFNOR XP Z 44-002, "Code for the
> representation of names of historical countries" (August 1997), that seems
> like it might be what you are looking for:
>
> http://www.freestd.us/soft2/638771.htm
>
> I had heard that this standard was withdrawn, but I can't be sure about
> that.
>
> Richard Wordingham <richard dot wordingham at ntlworld dot com> replied to
> a reply:
>
>  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.
>>
>
> ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code elements, once withdrawn, are not reused for 50
> years. That seems relatively stable to me.
>
> --
> Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, USA | http://ewellic.org
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