Re: Simple alternation
"C. M. Sperberg-McQueen" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.text.tei.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Oct 18, 2016, at 1:25 PM, Lou Burnard wrote: > On 18/10/16 20:15, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote >> Er, why tag it as unclear? It looks perfectly legible to me >> in the image. > > Because (I assume) it's not clear which is the right reading, specifically because of lack of clarity as to the initial letter. The 'unclear' element has a documented meaning; it marks spoken material which was made hard to hear by ambient noise or other problems, or written material which is hard to read because the handwriting is difficult or the page is damaged or whatever else can cause writing to be hard to read. The 'unclear' element does not mean "we are not sure what to do here" or mark any other form of lack of clarity. > >> Like Magdalena Turska, I think this looks like app and rdg. >> Both readings are from the same witness, but that’s not >> unknown. > > True, but it is rare (I would suggest nonexistent) to have *only* readings from a single witness. Rare, yes. Non-existent? In all the wide range of textual transmission, do you really believe that there are no marginal alternatives or inline corrections in ANY of the thousands of manuscripts which are the only witnesses to the text they contain? Wittgenstein's manuscripts are full of alternate readings; I have heard distinguished professors tell me that authorial variants are not AT ALL like the manuscript variants of medieval and ancient texts, structurally or in any other way, but for the most part it was immediately clear that they didn't know what they were talking about. Any text for which multiple versions exist or can be constructed from the textual tradition can be represented by app and rdg; it's what they are good for. > >> The documentation for ‘choice’ says >> >> Because the children of a choice element all represent alternative >> ways of encoding the same sequence, it is natural to think of them >> as mutually exclusive. However, there may be cases where a full >> representation of a text requires the alternative encodings to be >> considered as parallel. >> >> It would be a more obvious choice if the Guidelines specified one >> interpretation as a default and provided an attribute for overriding >> that interpretation. But I read the paragraph quoted as saying that >> you as an encoder are at liberty to take either interpretation; I’d put >> a remark in the header to inform later readers of the document. > > I'd forgotten about that weaselly worded paragraph. In all the years we've been using this element I have yet to see any case where "the alternative encodings" are also somehow "to be considered as parallel". Maybe because I'm having trouble working out what that might mean. If they're alternatives, how can they be parallel? Can you suggest an example? Why are you looking at me? Not my weaseling. But since alternative ways of encoding the same thing might be alternatives each of which capture part but not all of the truth, the paragraph quoted does seem to be trying to leave the door open to an imaginable use case. (At least, I can imagine that such a case might arise. Can I imagine such a case for real? Hmm.) Well, I don't know if this is a good use of choice, but since you asked so nicely ... Suppose we have a poem whose first letters spell out an acrostic message which does not otherwise appear in the poem. We want the acrostic message to be easily findable in a simple search of our document, so we want to transcribe those characters twice. Could one say that one has a choice between reading them horizontally (the 'normal' text) and vertically (the acrostic message), and encoding the normal text as one child of a 'choice' element, and the acrostic as a second? The two transcriptions do not, in this case, exclude each other in the same way that the w and m do in the example this thread started with. Michael -- **************************************************************** * C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies LLC * http://www.blackmesatech.com * http://cmsmcq.com/mib * http://balisage.net ****************************************************************