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

[David Sewell]

This might indeed be a case where the best solution would be for someone 
like Alexei who needs the element to add it via ODD customization. 
I'm open to being convinced in that direction & I think some in-person 
discussion will be helpful.

On Sun, 29 Mar 2009, Lou Burnard wrote:

> I just want to point out that the "level of abstraction" purportedly 
> introduced by the entity reference markup proposed in P4  was a snare and a 
> delusion, like any other semantic markup based on the use character entity 
> names, which is why we got rid of it. If you want to introduce semantic 
> distinctions amongst your punctuation marks, you must do it with proper XML 
> markup constructs like distinct elements, attribute values or whatever.
>
> Without wishing to prejudge the issue, I remain to be convinced that we need 
> something different from <g> or <c> to do this. It's hard enough explaining 
> the difference between <g> and <c>. I'm not looking forward to explaining why 
> the TEI has three different ways of tagging punctuation marks.
>
>
>
> David Sewell wrote:
>> 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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