[tei-council] Suppressed text: summary of position (FR 2242434)

[Gabriel Bodard]

See 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2242434&group_id=106328&atid=644065

The request is for an element to indicate text that the editor wants to 
mark as superfluous in the source text. It is perhaps unhelpful to 
compare this to "supplied", since it is a different kind of editorial 
intervention. (Supplied text is restored by the editor to indicate 
damage, error, or some other cause of omission of original text--it is 
relatively agnostic as to why the text was lost/omitted.)

In my field, this criterion of editorial markup is clearly recognised: 
the Leiden Conventions use curly braces to represent this phenomenon 
("litterae errore adiectae quas editor expunxit", e.g. dedika{ra}runt 
[citing Panciera 1980]). Currently EpiDoc--which aims to match Leiden 
concepts 1-to-1 with TEI patterns, recommends the use of "sic" for this 
distinction (see 
http://www.stoa.org/epidoc/gl/dev/erroneousinclusion.html which is 
somewhat out of date in general but current for this purpose).

Elena supplies a different kind of example:
<l n="4">a darmi morte, poi m'avete preso <omit>a tradimento</omit></l>
<l n='5'>sì com' l'uccellator prende l'uccello</l>
<gap/>
<l n="43">e lettere dintorno che diriano <omit>in questa guisa</omit></l>
<l n="44">Più v'amo, dëa, che non faccio Deo</l>

Where the text marked here with "omit" is identified by the editor 
(Contini 1960) as interpolated and doesn't fit in the meter; it is 
marked in the printed text with a smaller font. This is a clear case 
where "sic" is not appropriate, since it is not athetized by the editor 
because of scribal error, but for another reason. Nevertheless, it seems 
preferable to mark these two things with the same element.

"Sic" alone is not unambiguous, despite the EpiDoc recommendation cited 
above:

Eleph<sic>eph</sic>ant
or
Eleph<choice><sic>eph</sic><corr/></choice>ant

could mean either that the second "eph" is (a) included in error, and 
marked as superfluous by the editor, or (b) is marked by the editor as 
an error, but with no statement as to what the correct form should be. 
This situation could in theory be solved with an attribute (which 
wouldn't solve the case with interpolated verses), or a new element 
(which would). My recommendation is for the latter.

A final comment/recommendation re the element name: this is not a "gap" 
(which marks text missing from the edition, and therefore is empty 
element), but rather an editorial intervention marking text as 
superfluous. I don't much like the name "omit", despite its claimed 
parallelism with "supplied", since it seems to be a processing 
instruction rather than a description of what is in the text. (As noted 
above, "supplied" is a description of how this text gets into the 
edition when it is not in the source text. Our superfluous text may not 
be omitted--as in the verse example above in a smaller font, or the 
Leiden example in curly braces.) I would prefer something with the 
semantics of "superfluous", rather than "omit", "suppress", 
"expunxit"/"expunged" or the like. Might <superfl> be a bit less of an 
eyeful?

Notes:
Panciera 1980 = Hans Krummrey & Silvio Panciera, 'Criteri di edizione e 
segni diacritici', Tituli 2 (1980), 205-215.
Contini 1960 = Poeti del Duecento, ed. Gianfraco Contini. 
Milano-Napoli:Ricciardi I, 155-64.


-- 
Dr Gabriel BODARD
(Epigrapher & Digital Classicist)

Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London WC2B 5RL
Email: gabriel.bodard at kcl.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 1388
Fax: +44 (0)20 7848 2980

http://www.digitalclassicist.org/
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