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

[Daniel O'Donnell]

While I may have been more pithy than politic, I certainly didn't mean
to be uncharitable about the issue. I can certainly see how people might
want to mark these distinctions. But I think the lack of traditional
non-structural punctuation for this distinction is crucial. The
distinctions are far finer than most of us *can* regularly make, let
alone want to, and I agree with Lou here that type covers a lot of
ground for more specialist uses.

I'm still not convinced that q and quote are actually necessary, let
alone said. I like said as an element name, but am not sure about its
use being that necessary.

-dan

On Mon, 2007-04-16 at 16:02 +0100, Lou Burnard wrote:
> 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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> > 
> 
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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