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

Syd Bauman Syd_Bauman at Brown.edu
Mon Apr 16 10:18:32 EDT 2007


> 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'm not sure which 'all' you are asking about, but the answer, I
think, is yes, to some extent they are syntactic sugar for <q> with
type=. But that doesn't change the need for a new element, which is
very strong. The problem is that the Guidelines up to now have used
<q> for more than one thing.

But on further reading your reply, I think I may not have made myself
clear. The following
> > How about 
> > - <sot>: speech or thought
> > - <qst>: quoted speech or thought
> > - <said>: said
was not meant as a recommendation for 3 new elements, but rather as 3
possible names for the 1 new element we need to add.

The thought occured to me to use <said> with an aloud= attribute that
would be data.xTruthValue.

Thus you might see
   He was trying to butter her up in earnest now. She showed
   him a picture of her dog. <said>What a cutie! I bet he's smart,
   too.</said>, he said, as he thought <said aloud="false">gak, what
   an ugly dog</said> to himself.


> If we do ask tei-l next week, I'd like to ask first whether we need
> more than q and optionally quote.

I think it's pretty important that we make this distinction. I have
received quite a few complaints about the "<q> as speech or thought"
vs "<q> as written quotation, speech, thought, or example" problem.
While there are many (perhaps most) who don't care, there are a quite
a few projects for which the difference between quotations of written
passages external to the text and a character's spoken words in
running prose are really quite important.

I think the proposed solution brings the folks who don't care at all
and use <q> for everything into the fold, while giving those for whom
the nuances are important a mechanism for clean distinction.




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