Subject: Re: Proposed Greek Entities

From: [email-masked] (James Tauber SunLabs - SML)
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 1996 11:47:35 -0500

I am puzzled by the recently proposed Greek Entity set. The TEI has had
an entity set and writing system declaration for Ancient Greek for years.

Maybe I've missed something special about this new set.

James

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From: Patrick Durusau <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 1996 15:00:07 -0500 (EST)

> Maybe I've missed something special about this new set.

Sorry, I should have included a statement of the divergence from the TEI 
Greek entity set and reasons for it as part of my original post.  

1. The TEI Greek writing system declaration documents the TLG encoding of
Greek and uses a two letter language code appended to each entity, i.e.,
in this case "gr" rather than the more recent proposal of three letter
language codes, which in this case would be "grc." 

2. The TEI Greek writing system declaration sets forth composite entities 
for all the characters plus accents and has no separate entities for 
accents. As noted in the comments preceding the actual writing system 
declaration: "contrary to what the TLG summary says, the TLG files I have -->
<!-- examined place accents before capitals and after small letters -->
<!-- Thus here I have described all the combinations of letters and 
accents -->
<!-- This is not a good way of coding. -->"  The proposed set of entities 
has no composite characters.

3. The TEI Greek writing system declaration does not provide for any other 
characters that may be found in Greek manuscripts. This is true for the 
proposed set as well, but as noted, we are interested in using the 
proposed set of entities as a foundation for a larger set to be used in 
connection with actual manuscripts.

4. The TEI Greek writing system declaration omits an entity for elision or 
the number marker.

Your interest and comments are appreciated.

Patrick

Patrick Durusau
Information Technology
Scholars Press
[email-masked]
Technical Editior, TC, A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism