a) I agree marking up these phrases might be useful. (This doesn't just include simple modal verbs but also constructions involving 'require*', 'recommend*', 'optional*', since we already indicate these are equivalent to must, should, may.) I note that this will take more work than you might think, the way many of these are phrased mean automatic replacement would be error-prone. I would suggest that this be an addendum to the current ticket to be done once I've finished going through and checking them. (Doing it in two phases also means I double-check, though also someone else could do that to double-check my work? Happy either way.)

b) We note that we are basing our use of modal verbs on BCP14 not only in the Guidelines Style Guide http://teic.github.io/TCW/tcw24.html but also in the Guidelines themselves at http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/AB.html#AB-modal. To wit, I believe we already do what you are recommending.

Many thanks,

James

Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@newcastle.ac.uk
Senior Lecturer in Late-Medieval Literature and Digital Humanities

School of English, Newcastle University

I wonder if we shouldn’t be marking up these verbs (and constructions?) ant to render these visually distinct?
To me, that’d be a huge benefit for our meta language ODD in addressing technical documentation.

Best
Peter

> Am 18.12.2018 um 17:33 schrieb Martin Holmes <mholmes@uvic.ca>:
>
> I do like the clarity of RFC 2119 and/or BCP 14, which seem to be pretty much identical. I wonder if we should state explicitly that our usage of modal verbs is intended to conform with one of them?
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
> On 2018-12-18 7:29 a.m., James Cummings wrote:
>> Hi Peter, Martin, etc.
>> This ticket (https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues/1175#issuecomment-406592469) was something I was doing slowly when I got around to it. The actual work when you do it isn't difficult... Just double-checking that must/may/should etc. are all what we expect. Overall very few changes but mostly softening language (where we have said 'should' in past zealousness but even our own examples suggest 'may' is better). I'm happy to try to finish up the work sooner rather than later if desired.
>> Many thanks,
>> James
>> --
>> Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@newcastle.ac.uk
>> Senior Lecturer in Late-Medieval Literature and Digital Humanities
>> School of English, Newcastle University
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *From:* Tei-council <tei-council-bounces@lists.tei-c.org> on behalf of Scholger, Martina (martina.scholger@uni-graz.at) <martina.scholger@uni-graz.at>
>> *Sent:* 18 December 2018 15:17:29
>> *To:* Peter Stadler; Martin Holmes
>> *Cc:* TEI Council
>> *Subject:* Re: [Tei-council] Japanese translations incoming
>> Hi,
>> there is also a ticket https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues/1175 for that. James already started to work on that, but there are 4-5K hits to check. I think we should split the work, or James? I have put it on the agenda for our next call in January.
>> Thanks Martin for merging the translations!
>> Best wishes,
>> Martina
>> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
>> Von: Tei-council <tei-council-bounces@lists.tei-c.org> Im Auftrag von Peter Stadler
>> Gesendet: Dienstag, 18. Dezember 2018 07:39
>> An: Martin Holmes <mholmes@uvic.ca>
>> Cc: TEI Council <tei-council@lists.tei-c.org>
>> Betreff: Re: [Tei-council] Japanese translations incoming
>> I couldn’t agree more! We currently mark technical terms (elements, classes) but not modal verbs which leads to confusion not only when translating.
>> That’s quite an effort to go through the Guidelines and adjust (rephrase?) all those verbs but it would be a significant improvement.
>> I’d like to put that on the agenda for our next f2f and see whether we can develop a plan for achieving this. What do you think?
>> Best
>> Peter
>>> Am 17.12.2018 um 22:21 schrieb Martin Holmes <mholmes@uvic.ca>:
>>> They're using the spreadsheets, and I'm transferring things back manually, one row at a time. There has been some discussion over the use of (for example) "may" in the Guidelines -- does it mean "be allowed to" or "can-if-you-wish" -- which makes me wonder whether it's time to look again at the modal verbs in TCW 24:
>>> <http://teic.github.io/TCW/tcw24.html>
>>> perhaps with an eye on RFC 2119:
>>> <https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Martin
>>>> On 2018-12-17 12:30 p.m., James Cummings wrote:
>>>> That sounds excellent Martin! Thanks!
>>>> Out of interest what process are they using to update the glosses, descs, etc. Those spreadsheets or something else?
>>>> Many thanks,
>>>> James
>>>> --
>>>> Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@newcastle.ac.uk Senior Lecturer in Late-Medieval Literature and Digital Humanities School of English, Newcastle University
>>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> ---
>>>> *From:* Tei-council <tei-council-bounces@lists.tei-c.org> on behalf of Martin Holmes <mholmes@uvic.ca>
>>>> *Sent:* 17 December 2018 17:07:14
>>>> *To:* TEI Council
>>>> *Subject:* [Tei-council] Japanese translations incoming Hi all, Just a note to let everyone know that over the next little while I'll be slowly merging some new Japanese translations of glosses, descs and remarks into the dev branch. These are coming from some excellent work that Kiyonori and his team have been doing; they're about one-third of the way through the process of translating the spec files.
>>>> I'm going to do this slowly and look at each item before I include it, mostly for my own learning purposes, but also in case I might catch the odd misunderstanding.
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Martin
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