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#517 transcription of quranic "end of ayah"-sign

AMBER
open
Elli Mylonas
None
5(default)
2014-11-17
2014-07-07
Tobias J. Jocham
No

Dear Sir or Madam,

I have a request regarding the TEI Guidelines.

I am working at the project „Corpus Coranicum“ at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities. The Corpus Coranicum is working on a documentation of the quran text and we want to use the standards provided by the TEI.

However, the Quran has an occurrence which is – as far as I know – not covered by the TEI Guidelines, namely the divider between verses or “Verstrenner”, Unicode: 06DD, ARABIC END OF AYAH
It is a special characteristic of the quranic text and is used throughout quranic codeces and manuscripts citing the Quran. As the name suggests, it divides the verses of the Quran and displays the verses number in it.

Since there is no such element designated, we thought about using the <lb>- or <w>-element, but that would be a makeshift solution, which doesn't really do justice to the subject. While <lb> is usually used as a empty element for describing the meta-structure of a text, this end-of-ayah-sign is a part of the original text of the manuscript and thus needs to be transcribed as a part of the text itself. As any other “word” in a manuscript the markup of changes like correction, addition, deletion etc. and descriptive attributes like hand, numbering system [there are some different numbering systems of the quran] are required.
Thus we thought about using the <w>-element, but we hesitate to use this as the TEI declares this element as “a grammatical (not necessarily orthographic) word“. And the end-of-ayah-sign is neither: it is kind of a structural markup written by the scribe itself and not necessarily used in a consistent way throughout the manuscript, nor across different manuscripts.

Therefore we would be glad if the TEI Guidelines would supply an element especially for this occurrence or if you could point us to a well-thought and coherent solution. Plese note that the attached example contains hypothetical annotation in the lines 1-3 of this special charakter, which is to seen on the scanned image as a pile of four or more dots.

With best regards

Tobias J. Jocham

2 Attachments
CBL-I-Test.xml
CBLI-01r.jpg

Discussion

  • Lou Burnard

    Lou Burnard - 2014-07-07
    • Description has changed:

    Diff:

    --- old
+++ new
@@ -7,8 +7,8 @@
 However, the Quran has an occurrence which is – as far as I know – not covered by the TEI Guidelines, namely the divider between verses or “Verstrenner”, Unicode: 06DD, ARABIC END OF AYAH
 It is a special characteristic of the quranic text and is used throughout quranic codeces and manuscripts citing the Quran. As the name suggests, it divides the verses of the Quran and displays the verses number in it.

-Since there is no such element designated, we thought about using the <lb>- or <w>-element, but that would be a makeshift solution, which doesn't really do justice to the subject. While <lb> is usually used as a empty element for describing the meta-structure of a text, this end-of-ayah-sign is a part of the original text of the manuscript and thus needs to be transcribed as a part of the text itself. As any other “word” in a manuscript the markup of changes like correction, addition, deletion etc. and descriptive attributes like hand, numbering system [there are some different numbering systems of the quran] are required.
-Thus we thought about using the <w>-element, but we hesitate to use this as the TEI declares this element as “a grammatical (not necessarily orthographic) word“. And the end-of-ayah-sign is neither: it is kind of a structural markup written by the scribe itself and not necessarily used in a consistent way throughout the manuscript, nor across different manuscripts.
+Since there is no such element designated, we thought about using the &lt;lb>- or &lt;w>-element, but that would be a makeshift solution, which doesn't really do justice to the subject. While &lt;lb> is usually used as a empty element for describing the meta-structure of a text, this end-of-ayah-sign is a part of the original text of the manuscript and thus needs to be transcribed as a part of the text itself. As any other “word” in a manuscript the markup of changes like correction, addition, deletion etc. and descriptive attributes like hand, numbering system [there are some different numbering systems of the quran] are required.
+Thus we thought about using the &lt;w>-element, but we hesitate to use this as the TEI declares this element as “a grammatical (not necessarily orthographic) word“. And the end-of-ayah-sign is neither: it is kind of a structural markup written by the scribe itself and not necessarily used in a consistent way throughout the manuscript, nor across different manuscripts.

 Therefore we would be glad if the TEI Guidelines would supply an element especially for this occurrence or if you could point us to a well-thought and coherent solution. Plese note that the attached example contains hypothetical annotation in the lines 1-3 of this special charakter, which is to seen on the scanned image as a pile of four or more dots.
     

  • Lou Burnard

    Lou Burnard - 2014-07-07

    Since you are segmenting the whole text with <w> elements, you could use the <pc> element to distinguish this character from more strictly lexical words. That implies that this character serves to indicate the structure of the text in some way, which if I understand you, is the case here. Another possibility, if it also contains a number which labels the line, might be to use the <label> element.

     

  • James Cummings

    James Cummings - 2014-11-17
    • assigned_to: Elli Mylonas
     

  • James Cummings

    James Cummings - 2014-11-17

    Assigning to EM at Council F2F in Raleigh 2014-11-17; follow up and clarify potential problems with supplied encoding which might (or might not) solve problem if corrected.