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

[Lou Burnard]

Sorry, but I really do not agree with Syd on this issue, though I am 
pleased that he thinks I do!

As I understand it, the proposal is to invent a new element, presumably 
to join the already over-burdened Core module, for the purpose of 
marking up representations of speech (but not thought) which are 
considered (by someone) to be "part of the text", and not quoted from 
somewhere else. It's less clear whether or not such representations are 
necessarily typographically distinct in the original but that seems to 
be relevant.

I don't doubt that for some people and some applications these 
distinctions are important, and may even be useful, but I do doubt very 
much whether Mr or Ms TEI-average-user will want to make them. In the 
decade or more that people have been happily using <q> to mark 
"representation of speech or thought", I am not aware of anyone having 
the kind of major problem we are being told now exists. "representation 
of speech or thought" is an inherently vague concept (after all, that's 
what *all* text is!)  It's true that  some  feel we can distinguish "rep 
of speech or thought" which is "internal" to a work from ditto when 
presented as external, but that's why  we have both <q> and <quote>; I 
am happy with the idea of promoting <quote> as the tag to use if you 
want to make explicit that something is regarded as external, though I 
don't believe it to be strictly necessary.

If you want to distinguish more finely within either of these elements, 
the attributes are there: in particular, @type is there precisely to 
indicate whether the material is "spoken" "thought" or "written", and 
speech can be further subdivided according to  @direct.

So the best interpretation I can put on this proposal is that it is 
arguing for a new bit of syntactic sugar. Less charitably, and to quote 
our esteemeed Board chair, this looks like "a solution looking for a 
problem". Hmm, should that have been a <q> or a <quote>? does what 
someone says in an email count as <q> or <said> or what? aaargh!

Furthermore, I really don't think this is the most important issue for 
us to be consulting with Mr and Mrs TEI Average User about right now. 
They will say <said>not said but sad</said>...


Lou


Syd Bauman wrote:
>> 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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