(Sorry, I sent the first one by mistake!)


Dear Andrew, Peter, and Charlie,

Finally somebody started a thread!

If you don't mind my being very direct in what I write (I'm smiling, I assure you, because I totally share your doubts about how to mark up such cases), similar questions will always come up if we don't think starting from basic problems regarding how we look at manuscripts. We ought to first agree about the way we describe manuscripts and only then we can start to ask ourselves how to mark up. I believe two questions ought to be asked first (Peter partly pointed out already the first one in his reply): why mark up such phenomena? Also, I would add: to which degree of exactness?

As to the first question, there are obvious answers, such as if I'm preparing a diplomatic transcription or a critical edition, I have to do it. Then how? All solutions proposed entail the use of the elements <del></del> and <add></add>, as well as <subst></subst> (as in Charlie's example, who I guess is partly adopting our Cambridge standards), thus with the basic structure <subst><del></del><add></add></subst>. I totally agree with this approach, but...

Now let me answer to the first possible objection: in Andrew's example, is the scribe really adding something? Sure he is (let's not get politically correct, we know it was almost certainly a man, even if there is no colophon in the manuscript). He is not materially adding anything on the folio, sure, but what are we marking up? Let's say he wanted to substitute o with ā, then he would have added a mātrā, right? As we all know, the functioning of an abugida writing system rests on the principle of an inherent vowel. The point here is "as we all know." We are marking up transcriptions of manuscripts in scripts of which we know the functioning, so no need to get more catholic than the pope. Also, to a certain extent the scribe was substituting something with something else, by deleting an o and adding an a (or in other cases, a mātrā for any other vowel). I think that this is an elegant way of solving the "implicit" problem, though without using any further element or attribute.

The answer to my second question might also provide an answer to Andrew's second conundrum. In our catalogue we adopted two attributes for deletions and additions: for <add></add> we used @place to mark where the addition was made (using the standard values provided in the ENRICH schema), and for <del></del> we used the @type (values =yellow_paste, expuncted, erased, palimpsest, cancelled). I don't know if we can agree about the number or typology of attributes to be used, but this is not so important, as we will always have slightly different approaches, for as Peter pointed out, we have usually have different aims when describing manuscripts.

Thinking of the approach I have described above, the "we all know how an abugida works" argument might also solve the conundrum of marking up a whole akṣara or only a part. With this approach, there is no need to mark up only parts of an akṣara, as it is clear that only the mātrā was changed. (Also, no problem for cases of akṣaras divided by string holes, we can always nest the elements, if I get the problem–but I'm not really sure to have understood it.)

A belated Happy Eater to you all!

Camillo

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Today's Topics:

   1. some problems with encoding parts of ak?aras in manuscript
      transcriptions (Andrew Ollett)
   2. Re: some problems with encoding parts of ak?aras in
      manuscript transcriptions (Peter Scharf)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2018 22:50:16 -0500
From: Andrew Ollett <andrew.ollett@gmail.com>
To: indic-texts@lists.tei-c.org
Subject: [Indic-texts] some problems with encoding parts of ak?aras in
        manuscript transcriptions
Message-ID:
        <CAANHO15y_K1BRZLqj+PauXoxcvdgusDS1Df99juUp+W7xkV-Lg@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Hi everyone,

I have two questions about encoding manuscript transcriptions that I wanted
to submit to the collective experience of this group. Both relate to the
problem of ak?aras having "parts" that canonically occur in a certain
sequence but may be changed in a manuscript.

First, the cancellation of vowel m?tr?s. Does anyone have a good way to
encode this in TEI? In one manuscript (see this link <https://goo.gl/uYxV3R>)
the scribe has written "yo?do?da?o?o?a" (the last letter being mostly
obliterated by a worm hole), and cancelled out the last "o" (which is
written with the sideways "3") with a small cross-mark on top. The problem
is that by cancelling out the m?tr?, the scribe has changed the vowel.
Since we are transcribing in Roman transliteration, we would have to do
something like yo?do?da?o?<del rend="cross">o</del><add
type="implicit">a</add>?a, i.e., marking the addition of the vowel as
"implicit" (or something similar) in order to make clear that it's not a
new mark on the leaf. (If we were transcribing in Kannada script, we could
do ??????????<del>?</del>?, but that will surely cause rendering problems.)

Second, the "canonical" order of code-points and of transliteration for
conjuncts with initial r has the r first. In Kannada script, however, a
"flying r" is used, which occurs to the right of the other consonants in
the conjunct. Sometimes there's a feature that we want to encode *between*
the members of the conjunct, as in this example <https://goo.gl/BqNVg9>,
where a string-hole intervenes between the "gg" and the "r" of "m?rgga?".
How should we encode this? I know that some of you have used "ak?arapart"
to identify m?tr?s and other components of ak?aras, but I can't seem to get
around the problem of the reversed sequence of the phonological
representation and the graphic representation.

Grateful for any help!

Andrew
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Message: 2
Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2018 12:08:31 +0530
From: Peter Scharf <scharf@sanskritlibrary.org>
To: Andrew Ollett <andrew.ollett@gmail.com>
Cc: indic-texts@lists.tei-c.org
Subject: Re: [Indic-texts] some problems with encoding parts of
        ak?aras in manuscript transcriptions
Message-ID: <253C0C1B-A0F5-4808-9252-45D62D04BC83@sanskritlibrary.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Dear Andrew et al.,
        I'm interested in how others have handled this situation.  The way we handled it cataloguing the Brown, Penn, and Harvard collections of Sanskrit manuscripts was:

1. We transcribe in SLP1 which is a Romanization so allows splitting conjuncts and separating vowels from the consonants on which they depend.
2. We delete a whole vowel or consonant whenever any part of it is indicated as deleted in the ms. and add the whole replacement without comment, thus <del>o</del><add>a</add>.
3. For rendering in Devanagari or another Indic script, we thought it is not a difficult task to transpose the finer tagging of phones in a romanization to whole akzaras in an Indic script, so transposed one would get <del>ro</del><add>ra</add> [since r underscore is does not represent a Sanskrit sound SLP1 does not encode it so I'm alterning the example].
4. For features between conuncts,

<s part='I'>...g</s>
<gap reason='design'>
 <desc>string-hole</desc>
</gap>
<s part='F>g ...</s>

Most of the time, however, we ignored regular details like string holes and just included a description of them in the layout description rather than repeating the above prolixity.  I think that in this day and age when one can link to a graphic image of the manuscript page, it is unnecessary and undesirable to complicate transcription of manuscripts with irrelevant graphic details, and the utility of including these in diplomatic transciption is higly diminished.

Yours,
Peter

******************************
Peter M. Scharf, President
The Sanskrit Library
scharf@sanskritlibrary.org
http://sanskritlibrary.org
******************************

On 1 Apr. 2018, at 9:20 AM, Andrew Ollett <andrew.ollett@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I have two questions about encoding manuscript transcriptions that I wanted to submit to the collective experience of this group. Both relate to the problem of ak?aras having "parts" that canonically occur in a certain sequence but may be changed in a manuscript.

First, the cancellation of vowel m?tr?s. Does anyone have a good way to encode this in TEI? In one manuscript (see this link <https://goo.gl/uYxV3R>) the scribe has written "yo?do?da?o?o?a" (the last letter being mostly obliterated by a worm hole), and cancelled out the last "o" (which is written with the sideways "3") with a small cross-mark on top. The problem is that by cancelling out the m?tr?, the scribe has changed the vowel. Since we are transcribing in Roman transliteration, we would have to do something like yo?do?da?o?<del rend="cross">o</del><add type="implicit">a</add>?a, i.e., marking the addition of the vowel as "implicit" (or something similar) in order to make clear that it's not a new mark on the leaf. (If we were transcribing in Kannada script, we could do ??????????<del>?</del>?, but that will surely cause rendering problems.)

Second, the "canonical" order of code-points and of transliteration for conjuncts with initial r has the r first. In Kannada script, however, a "flying r" is used, which occurs to the right of the other consonants in the conjunct. Sometimes there's a feature that we want to encode *between* the members of the conjunct, as in this example <https://goo.gl/BqNVg9>, where a string-hole intervenes between the "gg" and the "r" of "m?rgga?". How should we encode this? I know that some of you have used "ak?arapart" to identify m?tr?s and other components of ak?aras, but I can't seem to get around the problem of the reversed sequence of the phonological representation and the graphic representation.

Grateful for any help!

Andrew
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On Sun, Apr 01 2018, Charles Li wrote:

Hi Andrew! So brave to be the first person to post!

Indeed, congratulations!

I have also struggled in silence and darkness with those very problems
which you describe. For the first issue -- vowel signs being added and
deleted -- I do something similar, but using slightly non-canonical TEI.
I actually include the consonant inside a <subst> tag to make explicit
the fact that it's that consonant being modified. So, for example,

    abhi<subst>dh<del rend="implied">a</del><add>ā</add></subst>ne

I use something quite similar in my transcriptions, e.g. for the
correction of /nti/ to /nte/ (see the image I’m trying to attach) I have
this:

<subst ana="#subst-vowel-addition"><del>न्ति</del><add>न्ते</add></subst>

The main difference to Charles’ solution is that I put the whole akṣara
into the del and add elements, which is of course not very precise.  But
for my current project I made up my mind that I would treat the
conjuncts as units that I wouldn’t split up any further.  I try to
compensate for this by adding an analysis attribute, which at least
let’s me easily query for classes of corrections/changes.

My reasons for doing this were two (and I should add that they are not
so strong that I’d like to recommend this as a general solution):

First, the transliteration would be easy from this kind of markup:

nti -> न्ति -> ন্তি -> nti

works fine.

But consider Andrew’s case of split vowel-signs, where we would have to
transliterate something like this:

ḷ<del rend="cross">o</del><add type="implicit">a</add>

What should the result look like?

ऌ्<del rend="cross">ो</del><add type="implicit">?</add>

This is not the same as the rendering problem: it seems to me the
implicit ‘a’ vowel cannot be put in the add element in certain kinds of
encoding.  So, unless I’m missing something, you would have to change
the markup to accomodate the encoding you choose: the XML would have to
change depending on whether you want to see this in an encoding that has
the implicit vowel “a” or not.  And also it’s unclear to me what the
content of the add element should be if the script has implicit vowels.
(Perhaps one will also have to fiddle with the virāma, but that usually
works out.)

One might say that this is a good reason against using this type of
encoding (not Latin-based) for analytical markup/transcriptions in the
first place.  But I have at least one case where I can’t split the vowel
signs up at all, regardless of encoding.  And this was the second reason
for me to treat conjuncts as units: in an early Bengali script, there
was a change from “o” to “ā”, by deleting the left, preceding vertical
stroke of the “o”’s sign, similar to this:

কো -> কা

I don’t see how one could describe this in any transcription scheme,
since it would mean analyzing the “o” into two components (even in the
Bengali Unicode block, the “o” vowel sign is just one point).  I saw no
way around this apart from a graphical analysis of the problem.

So I decided to just encode changes from one whole conjunct to another,
and link this up with an analysis of the type of correction/change that
was employed.  I also, like Peter, link these things to pictures when
possible so that it’s easier to see what’s going on in each individual
case.

This doesn’t solve the second problem Andrew mentioned, the “flying r”
preceded by a stringhole.  I’ve never had to encode this kind of thing,
where the phonological and graphical characteristics are inverse, and so
can’t say much about it.  Peter’s solution seems useful to me (adding
sequence attributes to make the situation clearer).  Theoretically, one
could also introduce a special character to transliterate the “flying
r”, something like this (spaces added):

mā gg<gap/>Xa ṁ  (or should it be “mā gg<gap/>aX ṁ”?)

where “X” is the “flying r”.  The drawback would of course be that the
rendering issues would be pretty hard to solve: you’d need to transform
all “X” into an “r” preceding the last cluster of consonants, plus you
would then not be able to represent the stringhole in its proper place
anymore.  But this seems like much more of a bother than dealing with
@part attributes.

I’d also be happy to hear other solutions to these two problems!

Best wihes,

--
Patrick McAllister

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