[tei-council] date proposal

[Lou's Laptop]

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> Lou Burnard wrote:
>>
>> Suppose you are working on a medieval source which refers to a date 
>> such as 12 i MDDDIV. If there are scads of such things chances are 
>> you'd prefer to work in the medieval calendar passim, so you want to 
>> just regularize[1] the date (to 1304-01-12). But if you want to 
>> compare dates between sources prepared using different calendars 
>> (e.g. you have a muslim source in which dates are given in some other 
>> form) you have to normalize[1] them as well. But normalizing  to the 
>> equivalent modern date (some time in dec 1303 probably) requires a 
>> major calculation, involving the precession of the equinoxes and the 
>> 30days we lost in 17-whenever and who knows what else.
> Is it possible, or isn't it? If it is possible at document creation 
> time, it is possible at document
> publication time. It may be major for you on your fingers and toes, 
> but I betcha a few hundred
> lines of Java can do it in a twinkling.
>
Of course, but I don't see where this argument is headed. A few hundred 
lines of java can do almost anything! The point of this attribute is to 
record a standardised version of the date to make life easier for people 
who don't have my script, or (more likely) can't make it work, or don't 
want the overhead of running it... by the same token (felicitous word) 
the bnc gives for every word two part of speech codes -- both a complex 
one and a simplified one, derived by a straightforward mapping.

p.s. for DDD please read CCC. soz.