[tei-council] Fwd: multiple lem in TEI

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Marjorie has sent a helpful discussion of the invalid example,
but it confuses me even further about which way we should go with this.

More input needed: is the example or the constraint wrong?

Begin forwarded message:

From: Marjorie Burghart <marjorie.burghart at ehess.fr<mailto:marjorie.burghart at ehess.fr>>

It's indeed an awkward example... If I understand correctly, its problem is not so much that it has several <lem> as that it does NOT really have one.
If you look at the example above the last one, you see that "Experience" is the lemma, and "Experiment" and "Eryment" are rejected readings - which is very fine: one and only one lemma, 1 or more readings.
The last example, as I understand it, expands on the previous one: it notes orthographic variants in <rdg>s, grouped with the main word they are subvariants in <rdgGrp>s. As a side note, in the area of philology with which I am familiar (Latin language, "literary" religious texts) minor orthographic variants are not considered significant in the history of the transmission of the text, and most philologists do not bother with them (they just announce in the introduction a list of words that have been given a standard spelling, usually). It is quite different though with people editing vernacular texts, so it all depends. But noting the orthographic variants can of course be useful if you are preparing an edition with links to digital facsimile of the witnesses.
In this case, <rdgGrp> comes in handy, but it seems that <lem> has a different meaning within a rdgGrp: apparently it does not mean that this is the reading of choice to retain in the main text, but the canonical spelling of the word. Therefore, in the last example, I do NOT see any real lemma, and I would be really bothered if I had to build a "main text". There should be something somewhere to note that the first <rdgGrp> containing "Experience" and its minor orthographic variants IS the actual lemma of this <app>.

Should there be a <lemGrp> then? :)

--
Sebastian Rahtz
Director (Research) of Academic IT
University of Oxford IT Services
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