[osis-core] [osis-user] Re: semantics of <divineName>?

[Steven J. DeRose]

I think (as I often do) that there is more than one issue here....

I see two separate reasons we might give the privilege of a special 
tag just to the tetragrammaton:

1: well-established conventions dictate typesetting it specially; it 
has to be marked up to do that (you can't scan the content for it, 
because you don't know how it's translated/transliterated in language 
X). It *could* be just an attribute value, but that would mean 
somewhat more work for stylesheet/processor writers, and somewhat 
more work for typical users (especially because attribute defaults 
are a little iffy in XML).

2: This one word has a far longer and far deeper meaning in religious 
history -- this word is unlike any other word. Presumably, this is 
why #1 arose in the first place. Our giving it the exalted status of 
being a tag (ooooooo) merely reflects it's status in the real 
(linguistic, cultural, and spiritual) world.

I think I hear Patrick saying that #1 is a lame reason for a separate 
tag -- and I tend to agree, although it might be a convenience for 
enough people to be worth it on mundane pragmatic grounds.

#2, however, seems to me *a* *big* *deal*. The extraordinary special 
honor/respect/treatment this word is given seems to cry out for quite 
special treatment.

<digression>I think it is a basic principle, that we should *not* 
assign any tag or attribute value spelled by those 4 letters. Doing 
so would raise a objections (and some fascinating rabbinic questions) 
that we needn't enter into. Probably it would lead to wholesale 
rejection of OSIS in the Jewish community.</digression>

Patrick raises a good point about confusion. Now in general I think 
the argument that if Patrick is confused, most others will be too, is 
generally sound. In this case, however, I suspect that the confusion 
may not arise from the question itself, but from the extent to which 
we fiddled around with this and went back and forth early on. Even 
more important, from the fact that we never solved the question of 
"what about all other names for divine and pseudo-divine entities. 
Remember the suggestion of <entity>? *That* would confuse xml people: 
"the entity element".

I think that if we lay out clearly what the intended usage is, it 
won't be so confusing, because:

(a) we'll be mirroring a familiar practice exactly, and

(b) we'll have said specifically what to do with the other cases one 
could get confused over.

The main other cases are:

1: other descriptors for God Himself

2: descriptors for angels, demons, idols, Greek titans, and so on

I think if we state best practice for these cases, we can avert the 
confusion in the future, and help sort out whatever confusion we may 
already have created (my apologies, I should have spotted this and 
raised the question way earlier).

Anyways, I would suggest:

<divineName> *only* for the tetragrammaton.

<name type="..."> for everything else -- perhaps best because it 
requires *no new tagses* (say that fast -- it could become a 
political slogan). But I think for clarity it is incumbent on us to 
recommend types. For example:

      deity, messiah, angel, demon, idol...

Just FYI, Roget's kicks in: God's messenger, archangel, celestial 
being, cherub, divine messenger, guardian, heavenly being, holy 
being, seraph, spirit, spiritual being, sprite, supernatural being

not to mention some amusing ones based on peripheral meanings like 
"angel investors", "little angels" , and the like.

by the way, can "a golden calf" be tagged <name type='idol'>?

I forget, have we provided name types for person, place, object, etc. already?

S
-- 

Steve DeRose -- http://www.derose.net, email deroses at mail.nih.gov or 
sderose at acm.org
Contractor, PubMedCentral (National Center for Biotechnology 
Information -- NIH)