On 11/18/2011 5:24 PM, Philippe Verdy wrote:
This arc in the example is definitely NOT mathematics
Nor did I say it was.
(even if you
have read a version where it was attempted to represent it using a
Math TeX notation in this page, an obvious error because it used an
angular \widehat and not the appropriate sign).
Irrelevant.
This arc is a true
phonetic mark of a contextual elision (the intermediate letter(s) are
not to be pronounced, even though they are still written to explicit
the phonetically elided word(s) and keep their usual orthography).
The fact that the function of the mark is to indicate a contextual
elision is
also essentially irrelevant to the analysis of whether such marking consists
of a mark (character) in text or a mark-up (non-character) of text.
The issue to pay attention to is whether the scoping of the modification of
text is cleanly delimited to a single character at a time, or is in
principle
extensible across n characters.
Exactly similar to other phonetic symbols like the elision tie (an arc
adjoininig two words to elide its separating space), or the apostrophe
(which replaces completely the elided letters).
And obviously a true candidate for plain-text: it provides
simultaneouly two readings of the text, one is purely phonetic (and
accurate for poems that have an essential and very strong rythmic
structure), another is semantic (by the orthography kept). All letters
have to be present in some way, even if some of them are marked for
the expected phonetic.
And is obviously *not* a true candidate for plain text representation.
This kind
of markup for simultaneous alternative readings of text is precisely where
representation by a richer mechanism makes sense. And this is merely the
veriest toe in the water for what I am referring to as "text scoring".
For an example of the complexity of various approaches to these kinds of
problems,
see:
http://www.ilc.cnr.it/EAGLES/spokentx/node31.html
And here is an example of a well worked-out, systematic, multi-level
scoring system
for prosodic information, the ToBI annotation conventions:
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~agus/tobi/labelling_guide_v3.pdf
--Ken
