[osis-core] Are quotes structure?

[Steven J. DeRose]

At 06:29 AM -0500 11/13/02, Patrick Durusau wrote:
>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?

That's a really interesting point.... I'm having a little trouble 
getting my head around that, but i think it's because the syntactic 
analysis aspect is so ingrained.

Would the consequence be that one just doesn't mark the elements 
formerly known as nested quotes :) ?

    Is there a decent way to parenthesize emoticons?

We could certainly still get the quotation marks placed by hand, 
though they couldn't be mapped between different national styles (for 
example, swapping single and double would only work by chance for 
US/UK usage, at least because of interference from apostrophes)....


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


-- 

Steve DeRose -- http://www.stg.brown.edu/~sjd
Chair, Bible Technologies Group -- http://www.bibletechnologies.net
Email: sderose@acm.org