[tei-council] TEI Guidelines display

[Lou Burnard]

On 30/10/12 10:03, James Cummings wrote:
> On 30/10/12 09:52, Lou Burnard wrote:
>> One of the smarter students here in Tours has just pointed out to me
>> that although it's marvellous having the element spec descriptions
>> displayed in French, it's really confusing to see the explanatory
>> expansion of an English tag name given in French. For example, if you
>> look up the spec for <lb> in the Guidelines in French you will see
>>
>> <lb>(saut de ligne) marque le début d'un ligne...
>>
>> This doesnt really explain to the enquiring mind why the tag is "lb"
>> (rather than say "sl"_).
>>
>> It would be better if it said
>>
>> <lb>(i.e. line break : saut de ligne) marque le début d'un ligne...
> Isn't this making the mistaken assumption that the TEI tag names
> are in English?  Admittedly they are often derived from English
> words, so maybe it would be better.

That is the point. You can say "ah they;re not really English words" 
till you're bleu in the face, but the fact is the TEI gis have a 
distinctly anglosaxon ring to them

The student in question just wants a handle to help remember what the 
tag means... and an English expansion works better than a non-English 
one for that purpose.

>
> To play devil's advocate, I might point out that the gloss for
> <secFol> is "(second folio)" when the element name really derives
> from the term Secundo Folio and that is how it is referred to in
> the prose

hard cases make bad law: in this case, I think, the primary gloss should 
probly be "secundo folio" , but either way "deuxieme folio" really 
doesnt help understand why this element has this gi.



> http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/MS.html#msmisc "The
> secFol element (for ‘secundo folio’) is used to record...".  This
> leads to the conclusion that the glosses are translated and so
> 'saut de ligne' is correct. Are you suggesting that we should
> always prefix glosses with the English version or the 'native
> language from which the element name was derived' version? i.e.
> should it be:
> (secundo folio: second folio)?

the former, if the tag name is (as they all are, except this one) 
derived from english words