ξύμφημὶ in Xenophon, Ways and Means

[scott-fleischman]

The accents come out wrong in this word as shown in the following link.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Xen.+Ways+4.51&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0209

The code has εἴρηκα <del>ξύμ</del>φημὶ ἐγὼ which shows the issue is with the combination of the apparatus marking and word accent. I'm not sure how to resolve it though.

[lcerrato]

The book reads [ξύμ]φημὶ so this seems to be a Perseus display issue rather than an error. The word study tool strips the accents, so the dual accents make no difference to analysis.

[scott-fleischman]

Ok thanks for looking into it.

It's easy enough to understand by looking at it—with the brackets that is—however, from a machine-readableness view, it's not as convenient to work with. I guess I would prefer the data to look something more like <editor>φημὶ</editor><written>ξύμφημι</written>. That way the program won't have to figure out that the two accents shouldn't be there if it's trying to interpret the text using the text as written.

An analogous thing occurs in Xenophon On the Art of Horsemanship 11.9, we see <del>ἢ καλὸν ἢ δεινὸν ἢ</del> ἀγαστὸν <del>ἢ θαυμαστόν</del>, ὡς…. If we read it using the deleted text we get ἢ καλὸν ἢ δεινὸν ἢ ἀγαστὸν ἢ θαυμαστόν, ὡς… but if we read it with the suggested text deleted, then we get ἀγαστὸν, ὡς…. Note however, that we need to change the grave to an acute for proper accentuation: ἀγαστόν, ὡς….

All that to say, it's easy for humans to do that, but not as easy to do it programmatically.

[lcerrato]

Hi, I believe that the EpiDoc guidelines for this recommend supplied (as add applies to an ancient hand). Again, a common issue throughout the corpus.

<choice> followed by <reg> and <orig> is a valid option it appears http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-reg.html