[tei-council] Note on 2372570, "element for punctuation marks"

[David Sewell]

As an addendum to this note, if you compare the P3 section on "Treatment 
of Punctuation"

   http://www.tei-c.org.uk/Vault/GL/P3/CO.htm#COPU

with the P5 version

   http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/CO.html#COPU

it seems that the TEI-specific entity names in P3 offered a level of 
abstraction for punctuation marks that we have lost in P5 and that the 
proposed <punct> element would restore.

(For what it's worth, the word "punctuation" has occurred in only 3 
different threads since 1997 on TEI-L.)

David

On Sun, 29 Mar 2009, David Sewell wrote:

> ["Adopt-a-RED" note]
>
> Submitter: Alexei Lavrentev
>
> Reference:
> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2372570&group_id=106328&atid=644065
>
> DISCUSSION:
>
> Alexei has presented an extended argument for the addition of a <punct>
> element in his revised TEI MM 2008 paper, available here:
>
> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/download.php?group_id=106328&atid=644065&file_id=303629&aid=2372570
>
> I think we're going to need to talk about this face to face; I don't
> feel competent to make a yes/no recommendation without further
> discussion. I would urge everyone to read the paper ahead of our meeting
> (it's only 5 pages), out of courtesy to Alexei if nothing else, as he is
> one of the local organizers.
>
> My own opinion is that he makes a strong case for a dedicated
> punctuation element. I think he's right that within the context of
> Linguistic Segment Categories (17.1), <c> makes much more sense as
> markup for characters that can be part of words or morphemes. I'm not in
> a position to evaluate his arguments based on automated language
> processing or medieval manuscript practice, but I can immediately see an
> application in an area I'm more familiar with, encoding of manuscript
> verse by Emily Dickinson. Her use of the dash is notorious for its
> polysemy, and attempts have been made to characterize different types of
> dash. From that point of view there is no single dash "character",
> rather a set of idiosyncratic punctuation markers that may or may not
> take identifiable distinct forms. Having a <punct> element available
> would simplify interpretive markup of her verse.
>
> David
>
>

-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
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