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Source: notes file
Date: 2 Feb 2004
File name: Wp2165a
Keywords: symbol
Title is partly in Greek. I've tried to capture it but got stuck with what seems to be a symbol for omicron+upsilon, with superposition of the latter so that it looks quite like the symbol for Taurus. It didn't seem right to capture this as two separate entity refs, so I've put "GAP="symbol" for now. The symbol occurs twice, the first time with what I think is a perispome. I've also used &iacugr; and &Iacugr; from the extra Greek set - I hope correctly.
PFS: I'm familiar with this symbol (common, I think, in early cursive-based Greek type fonts), and have wondered if we would ever have to decide how to record it. How badly do you think we would misrepresent the text if we followed the pattern set by our treatment of ae and oe digraphs and simply recorded this as two letters, Greek o and u? (i.e. &ogr;&ugr;) ? I think that in origin it's simply one of the ligatures-become-digraphs that tend to occur in cursive hands. Anyway, that's what I'm inclined to do.
Source: notes file
Date: 8 Mar 2004
File name: Wd1394a
Keywords: Hebrew, character
Text is a commentary on the last 50 psalms. I used the names of the Hebrew letters as div types for the acrostic 119th, following the author's heads, but wasn't sure of the standard modern spellings. I used the spellings preferred by Unicode, but there seems to be a lot of variety, eg Oxford dictionaries have "aleph" but not Unicode's "alef" even as a variant.
PFS: we used the Unicode names when inventing Hebrew character entities (see eebochar.ent), so I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be consistent and use them here too. However, an alef-betical sequence seems much more appropriate to the N attribute than to TYPE. We'd say (e.g.) TYPE="part" N="a" / TYPE="part" N="b" / etc. So I changed your <DIV2 TYPE="alef"> (etc.) to <DIV2 TYPE="part" N="alef"> (etc.) IN fact, why not go further and make them actual charents, so that they would be liable to conversion to unicode characters when and if that happens? I.e. N="&alef;"
Source: notes file
Date: 5 Feb 2004
File name: S24049
Keywords: Greek
Captured capital Greek letters on title pages using ISOgrk1 charents. Breathings are not captured on ref 402 - is there a way to do this?
PFS: within the character entities available to us, there are 'composed' characters in the TEIgrk set that would let us do this
The word in question is HEXALE/XION, that is,
&Egr;&Xgr;&Agr;&Lgr;&Egr;&Xgr;&Igr;&Ogr;&Ngr;
Of these, the initial cap epsilon has a rough breathing (dasia); and the second epsilon has an acute accent (tonos). The TEIgrk charents for these are: &Erougr; and &Eacugr; (which correspond to Unicode character positions 1F19 and 0388 respectively). Our custom hitherto has been to ignore breathings and other diacritics attached to Greek letters unless there is some urgent and specific reason to capture them, but given how few there are, we could certainly capture them.
Source: notes file
Date: 26 Nov 2004
File name: Ws3535
Keywords: Greek
This text has a number of headings of capitalized Greek or capitalized Greek and Latin. There are also, as I read it, some centred words of uc Greek which are not heads but quotations.
The context is that the author claims Bentley's edition of Callimachus plagiarizes a previous edition, and then goes through the works of Callimachus detailing the allegations.
Because the keyers had partially captured many of the Greek heads as entity references, I decided to try to capture the Greek headings as entity refs, rather than just make them all <GAP foreign>. I've changed some of what SPI captured as <HEAD> to <Q><GAP Foreign></Q>, and vice-versa. But I'm not confident my interpretation is always right.
PFS: this is one of those troublesome books that quote or otherwise refer to other books (that they are reviewing or rebutting) and incorporate within the quotations structural elements (e.g. headings) of the book that they are quoting, making it difficult to tell whether something is a Q or a HEAD (often it is both, since it is a quoted head); or indeed whether the divisions so marked are divisions of the book in hand or of the book being reviewed.
Reviewer: how do we capture the accent after Greek letters which makes them numbers? There are four, on im23, which I have captured with a keystroke, eg <HEAD>&Agr;'</HEAD>
PFS: I do not believe that we have made any special provision for these, out of a reluctance to get too deeply involved in Greek. (I think we've used the keyboard single-quote character ('), as you have done). There is a Unicode codepoint for this character (U+0374 'Greek numeral sign'), but no public charent as far as I know. Unless there is a groundswell of support for inventing one (? &numeralgr;), I'd be inclined to stick with '.
Reviewer: There are three <HEAD>s with a strange gamma-like letter. It's clearly meant to represent pi and so, because there are plenty of normal-looking gammas in the text, I've captured it as &Pgr; - although there are examples of normal Pi as well. It's noticeably shorter than the other letters: could it have been used as a stop-gap?
PFS: I can go no further on this than you have: it looks a Pi with the second leg truncated. I know no more. I agree that it should probably be captured as &Pgr;, even if we don't know where it came from.
Source: notes file
Date: 17 May 2002
File name: S20467
Keywords: Greek
On the left hand page near the top on image 32 transliterated Greek u 'pratrethai, had been captured with # for the first t, because there is in entref terms an acute accent above it. As there is no entref for this I have captured it as simple t for the moment. There are many examples of transliterated Greek words in the text, which Tech have transcribed using apostrophes and acute accents where appropriate
PFS: Although I still don't recognize the word, I think the first t+acute is really a blotted i+acute (i.e. í), and the word is "hup(e)r-airethai". Compare the more clearly printed participle on the previous image (img 31, left side, about 12 lines down, 'uprairomenos). If the "t" is really an "i", the problem goes away. If not, we'll need to add the ISODIA (diacritics) entity set to the dtd if we haven't already done so. This contains stand-alone diacritics like "acute".
A bigger problem here is the whole unanticipated problem of transliterated Greek, and in particular the real and important distinction between rough breathings (which look like an opening single quot.) and smooth breathings (which look like a closing single quot.), e.g.. between (on img 31, 7 lines down) the breathings on the article and the noun o' 'antikeimenos--rough breathing on the o' and smooth on the 'a. Our keying instructions did not prepare for this, and it is hard to see how they could without introducing the distinction elsewhere (e.g. when the symbols are merely punctuation marks--true single quot. marks), which we would rather not do.] Accordingly, Tech have not distinguished these two characters (or diacritics, as you prefer), and we have not revised their work on this point.