Re: Simple alternation

I am relatively new to TEI, but in other work I have encountered
something similar to the issue of which of these is correct:

<choice>
   <unclear>m</unclear>
   <unclear>w</unclear>
</choice>euyn

OR

<choice>
   <unclear>meuyn</unclear>
   <unclear>weuyn</unclear>
</choice>

The argument for using the second possibility is that you can
easily find the word 'meuyn'.  I don't think there was anything
else in its favor, because the first option correctly
(and minimally) captures the source.

Assuming I understood that reason, it is not good reasoning because
it suggests that you should use sub-optimal markup because of a
limitation in the tools you have.

The purpose of the XML source is to capture the structure of the
document.  The XML source is not necessarily what you use to study
the document directly: you need to transform it in some way.  If you
need to look for specific words, then you transform it in a way that
lets you more easily locate the words.  Applying a simple transformation
to unclear tags is one of several things you may need to do in order
to make a new (temporary) document that lets you find all words
using a simple string search.  But it is just one-time work to set that 
up.

Apologies if my comments are based on a misunderstanding, or if I am
saying something that already is obvious to all of you.

David


On Wed, 19 Oct 2016, Raffaele Viglianti wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 7:56 AM, Magdalena Turska <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> If, alas, the aim of the TEI encoding is to capture that ur-source then, yes, <unclear> might have a place there.
> Such a reconstruction feels odd though and in my opinion calls for some careful policy and documentation at least.
> 
> 
> I don't think this is about reconstructing a supposed "ur-source", rather it seems to me that Paul is translating
> editorial markup from the original document he showed us into TEI markup. The question marks in the original document
> indicate uncertainty, not variance.
> 
> I would lean towards an econding that is closer to what I see in the original document:
> 
> <choice>
>    <unclear>m</unclear>
>    <unclear>w</unclear>
> </choice>euyn
> 
> but as Poitr has pointed out, it may be more useful to indicate the lemmas separately, depending on what the encoding is
> for.
>  
> Raff
> 
>