[osis-core] Are quotes structure?

[Patrick Durusau]

Guys,

Interesting conversation with the British and Foreign Bible Society 
folks in London last week. They are very supportive of OSIS and thought 
you had done a very good job with it!

I mentioned that we were still having some difficulty with the deeply 
nested quotes and they asked whether we should consider most quotes as 
structures in the text at all. In other words, are those quotes 
presentational and not structural elements in a text?

Prompted by that question, I looked back at the TEI Guidelines, which 
seem to turn on making off material that is not in the "narrative 
voice," that represents a direct quotation (like from a book or journal 
article), or the speaker when you are dealing with dialogue.

I have not gone back through Troy's examples yet but it seems to me that 
the rendition problem (apart from the structure) could be solved by 
simply including the appropriate quotation marks in the text stream. For 
most of the translations that adopt this use of quotes, they are not 
reflecting structures in the original text at all, well, at least that 
are not marked in the original text, so it really is just a presentation 
matter and not structure in the text.

In other words, where a prophet is quoting the Lord, the break is 
between the prophet and the Lord, in terms of the narrative voice, is it 
not? So, "Say to my people...." which continues with what to say is in 
one voice, the Lord's.

Does that help with any of our outstanding issues?

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
pdurusau@emory.edu