Re: [tei-council] Freeze on October 1

I think it’s perfectly possible to not have a base text, what confuses me is how you’d do that with parallel segmentation where not all words are in an <app>. The words not in an <app> are manifestly part of a "base text" whether you believe in that or not. What I don’t understand is how there can be a base text *except* inside <app> (though granted, there might be simple cases where you could do it). Put another way, I don’t think you should be using parallel segmentation if you don’t want to have a base text. You should be encoding all your sources and linking them. You’re quite right though that this isn’t the venue for tilting at this particular windmill. :-) My only concern is that the current wording comes close to recommending against using <lem> and it should be pushed back a bit in the other direction. I’ll see if I can improve on it.

On Sep 28, 2015, at 13:01 , Lou Burnard wrote:

The trouble is that this wording asserts your (perfectly defensible but controversial) opinion on a topic without leaving space for dissent. Some people (I am told) don't agree that the concept of "a base text" makes much sense. Why *should* (your stars) I choose to privilege one of my readings as the base for the others? Why shouldn't I opine that there's no base text? And I don't need to mark every word as part of an app entry in that case : the words that are not part of an app entry are common to all witnesses.

But we shouldn't really be having this fight here: I am only arguing for retaining the status quo. If you want to say something like "if, as is often the case, one reading is regarded as the preferred or base reading, then it should be marked using <lem> rather than <rdg>" I'll shut up.