[tei-council] Dates and calendars

[Martin Holmes]

On 12-08-15 04:37 AM, Gabriel Bodard wrote:
> On 2012-08-14 21:46, Martin Holmes wrote:
>> So I think it's important to be able to use @calendar whenever you use
>> @*-custom, and @calendar SHOULD be taken to refer to the values of
>> @*-custom. In other words, I think the definition of @calendar should be
>> expanded thus:
>>
>> "indicates the system or calendar to which the date represented by the
>> content of this element, and/or the dates expressed in attributes from
>> att.datable.custom, belong."
>>
>> Without this, there's no way to provide a formal link from a date like this:
>>
>> <date when-custom="3050"/>
>>
>> to a calendar (e.g. Anno Mundi).
>
> Surely that's precisely what @datingMethod is for? <date
> when-custom="3050" datingMethod="#anno_mundi"/> means I'm normalizing a
> date to the AM calendar (which is defined in a <calendar> element with
> @xml:id=anno_mundi).

I had completely misunderstood that. I assumed that because it's defined 
like this:

"datingMethod	supplies a pointer to a calendarDesc element or other 
means of interpreting the values of the custom dating attributes."

i.e. pointing to a <calendarDesc> rather than a <calendar>, it was 
pointing to some kind of textual description of how the dating method 
actually worked, rather than what calendar it was. Obviously not, since 
<calendarDesc> can contain only <calendar> elements.

(But shouldn't that definition be amended to "...pointer to a <calendar> 
element..."? A <calendarDesc> is likely to contain multiple <calendar> 
elements, and you'd presumably want to point to only one of them.)

> The distinction between @calendar and @datingMethod is very clear (the
> former defines the content of the element, the latter the @*-custom
> attributes). Martin's suggestion is premised on the fact that in all of
> the examples we are imagining the two are the same, so it seems an odd
> redundancy to say:
>
> <date from-custom="1547" to-custom="1633" calendar="#julian"
> datingMethod="#julian">1547-1633</date>
>
> Which is indeed a pain (I might be inclined to say that when
> @datingMethod is absent, we assume the *-custom attributes follow the
> same calendar as defined in @calendar, but that makes me slightly nervous).

It is a pain, indeed, although I see your point. I stand corrected. I'll 
use both together, then.

Cheers,
Martin

> But consider the following cases where the transcribed date and the
> non-Gregorian normalization are different calendars. It is the norm in
> classical studies to normalize all dates to the proleptic Julian
> calendar, to avoid saying something like: <date when="-0044-03-13">the
> Ides of March</date> (which should be March 15th). This is true even if
> the date we're encoding is not Julian, but in some other form: "Pachon
> 19, 12th year of the reign of Tiberius" or "11 October, 4th Indiction"
>
> For these we'd use something like @calendar="#romano-egyptian"
> @datingMethod="#julian".
>
> I'm not sure it's a very good idea to expect @calendar to serve double
> service as Martin suggests...
>
> G
>
>

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)