[tei-council] Values of @xml:lang on <exemplum>

David Sewell dsewell at virginia.edu
Wed Apr 29 21:53:44 EDT 2009


All,

I'm in the midst of working on the languages associated with <exemplum> 
elements in P5/Source/Specs/*.xml, and a couple of things need resolving 
before I (or anyone) starts making changes. (Sebastian, the questions at 
the bottom will have implications for rendering of the specs.)

The current situation is that the original <exemplum>s have no
@xml:lang attribute. Their content is mostly English-language. In 
addition:

   505 translated Chinese exempla have xml:lang="zh-tw".

   5 translated French exemple have xml:lang="fr".

For <exemplum>s with no @xml:lang, there are three basic situations:

1. The language of the example is English, entirely or with the exception of 
small portions;

2. The language of the example is in one or more other identifiable
natural languages, e.g. Latin or Old English:

    http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-body.html

    http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-colophon.html

3. Apart from attribute values, the exemplum does not really belong to a 
natural language, e.g.

   http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-bicond.html

Cases #1 and #3 seem clear-cut. The former takes @xml:lang="en", the
latter takes @xml:lang="" (the latter is the explicitly recommended
XML practice for tagging an element where you want to suppress language
information, see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-lang-tag).

But what about cases like #2? Are we labeling the language *content* of
the exempla, or the language *context*? What I mean is: the exempla for
<colophon> are clearly in Latin, but their *context* is something like
"European scholarly discourse". One would probably not want to translate
them into French or German (Chinese or Japanese are another story).

I would suggest, then, that we merge cases in #2 with #3 and assign them
all @xml:lang="". Those exempla are then considered language-neutral for
purposes of display. I assume that's more important to us than enabling
people to search for <exemplum>s that happen to be in Old English or
Arabic or whatever?

David
-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 801079, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
Courier: 310 Old Ivy Way, Suite 302, Charlottesville VA 22903
Email: dsewell at virginia.edu   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/


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