[tei-council] quotation marks, quotes, etc.

[Daniel O'Donnell]

On Sun, 2007-04-15 at 21:01 -0400, Syd Bauman wrote:
> > I don't much like <quo>. Its neither a word not a decent
> > abbreviation in English, but has a meaning in Latin, which seems
> > unwise. 
> 
> Oh, good point about the Latin. According to one dictionary "quo" is
> an archaic version of "quoth" (somewhat archaic itself), as in "Quoth
> the the raven, 'Nevermore'". But I'm pretty sure that doesn't trump
> the disadvantage of the Latin.
> 
> 
> > <speech> and <spoken> are available but not perfect.
> > <quotedSpeech>? oh, and <qs>, as an abbreviation for quoted speech
> 
> I don't wonder if <qs> looks to much like <ps>, which element I hope
> to add next week. Probably not a good argument against.
> 
> How about 
> - <sot>: speech or thought
> - <qst>: quoted speech or thought
> - <said>: said

Are these not all syntactic sugar for q at type? I am not at all keen on
introducing more elements here, since the two we have are historically a
place where people have a mess of a time.

I agree with Sebastian that I like the idea of q as the default element.
I'm less keen on trying to distinguish the others, partially because it
is not a structural distinction people make in actually non-marked up
running text--unlike, arguably q vs. socalled which is sometimes
indicated by double or single quotations, though it is a bad habit, I'm
told. I can see people having an immense amount of difficulty with this:
is this a "speech or a thought" but not "quoted speech or thought" and
not "said"? Do I need to tag every indirect quotation? ad infin.

Another argument against it is the very nomenclature difficulty we are
having: q/quote/qst and with a little extension, said, are all arguably
short forms of the same word: quote/quotation.

People who really need this level of granularity can surely use @type or
some form of seg? If it turns out that there is a real need for this,
treating q as the base element will allow us to introduce more later.
But I think this may be a solution looking for a problem.

If we do ask tei-l next week, I'd like to ask first whether we need more
than q and optionally quote. My next preference would be for
q-quote-said, and finally something like q-quote-said-iquote (for
indirect quote).

-dan
> 
> 
> > I think that airing this on TEI-L next week, if people agree, would
> > be no bad thing.
> 
> I agree.
> 
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-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Director, Digital Medievalist Project http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Canada
Vox: +1 403 329-2378
Fax: +1 403 382-7191