[tei-council] sluice your glosses

[Lou Burnard]

A French colleague has been very helpfully re-reading and correcting 
gross errors in the French translation of TEI Lite I mentioned a week or 
two ago. He's picked up lots of slips in the P5 tag descriptions, as 
well as some gaps, typos, missing accents etc. He also makes a strong 
plea for finding some better way of explaining the tag name "sic". In 
the English, this is glossed "Latin for "thus" or "so"; in the French 
simply "latin pour ainsi" (which is unidiomatic and fairly 
incomprehensible). He suggests we need to explain more exactly why this 
tag is so named.

"Au lieu de (latin pour ainsi ) qu’un non spécialiste relira plusieurs 
fois pour comprendre je dirais plutôt « expression latine signifiant 
identique utilisée dans les édition savantes pour signaler l’édition 
d’un passage ou d’un mot à l’identique »

C’EST LONG MAIS MALHEUREUSEMENT LES GÉNÉRATIONS ÉTUDIANTES ACTUELLES EN 
France (JE NE PARLE PAS DES CHARTISTES OU DES NORMALIENS) IGNORENT LA 
PLUPART DES EXPRESSIONS OU SENTENCES LATINES. DONC SI TU VEUX ÉLARGIR LE 
PUBLIC, COMME POUR LES REF LITTÉRAIRES IL FAUT ETRE MOINS ÉLITISTE"

( "les ref litteraires" is because I forgot to include bibliographic 
references for the new French examples in the version he read; now fixed)

But the trouble is, the <gloss> in a TEI element spec is just intended 
to expand on a gi  such as <lb/> (or, indeed, <gi>) which isn't a word 
-- not give a long explanation of why it is so called. Otherwise we'll 
never finish. So I am inclined to think that the best solution is just 
to remove the <gloss> entirely -- in English as well as other languages 
-- and maybe add a <remark> explaining why this tag is so-named.