Coding for a speech that is not in a drama

[boers68]

This may be a question about indexing and not coding, because I don't understand the difference. We saw an example of TEI coding for plays, which note a speech and speaker (sp> and <speaker>, but how does one tag a speech in a different kind of text?

My exercise is from the first part of the Illiad, which includes the speech "Sons of Atreus", but Oxygen doesn't like either of those. If I wanted to collect all parts of the text which are in first person, how would that be coded? I don't think <q> serves here. Or would indexing fix that?

`

and he besought the Achaeans, but most of all the two sons of Atreus, who

           <l>were their chiefs. "Sons of Atreus", he cried "and all other Achaeans, may the</l>
           <l>gods who dwell in <placeName>Olympus</placeName> grant you to sack the city of 

Priam, and to reach your homes in safety; but free my daughter, and accept a ransom for her, in reverence to Apollo, son of Zeus." On this the rest of the Achaeans with one voice were for respecting the priest and taking the ransom that he offered; but not so Agamemnon ` Thanks, Greta

[gabrielbodard]

Actually I think <q> may be the best element for this, since we're talking about direct speech, no? But you would have to either close the speech at the end of each verse-line and re-open it, so as to avoid overlapping with the <l> tags, or use some other mechanism (anchors or stand-off markup) to indicate the start and end of each speech.

Does Perseus mark direct speech at all in their XML of the Iliad?

[gabrielbodard]

Answering my own question (Perseus's Iliad in XML) … they do tag speech in the English translation, incorrectly using <quote>, and they don't tag verse lines (perhaps because it is a prose translation?).

[cmohge1]

I agree with Gabby -- I would suggest <q type="spoken">. But this demonstrates a classic 'overlapping hierarchy' problem with XML: if you tag verse structure, you'll break your XML if you try to encode any other semantic features that cross over the lines (like quotes, or phrases). One way to sort this is to use the 'Trojan horse' approach with <anchor> that G alluded to:

<l>were their chiefs. <q type="spoken">Sons of Atreus"</q>, he cried 
<q type="spoken" xml:id="atreus-sp1" />and all other Achaeans, may the</l>        
<l>gods who dwell in <placeName>Olympus</placeName> 
grant you to sack the city of <placeName>Priam</placeName>, and to reach</l>
<l>your homes in safety;</l>
</lg>
<lg><l>but free my daughter, and accept a ransom for her, in reverence to <name>Apollo</name>,</l>
<l>son of <name>Zeus</name>.<anchor prev="#atreus-sp1"/>

[boers68]

Thank you!