Editorial comments

As form-orientated editors we were sworn not to interfere with our texts. And yet there were occasions which almost demanded that we left a mark or at least a marker in the transcriptions. This was accomplished by means of two tags:

• <note>
• <sic>

Corrections

One of our debates featured the fate of uncorrected errors: Scribes variably corrected their errors: some did frequently, others rarely. Had we left uncorrected errors as they stood, the reader might have been left in a quandary as to their source. Were they in the original manuscript, or were we to blame?

The solution presented itself in the <sic> tag. On the one hand, <sic> allowed us to retain the original text. On the other hand, it also signified our awareness of the need for correction. Which would hopefully help the reader who might otherwise have been in her quandary.

The two salient features of <sic> are:

• the suspect form is enclosed between <sic> ... </sic> tags
• the opening tag is followed by the corr attribute which defines the supposed target form

In one example, the expected form brenhin is represented by the clearly incorrect brenkin. This is represented in transcription by:

<w><sic corr="brenhin">brenkin</sic></w>

A word containing an error may extend over two lines. In such cases, only the part of the word containing the error is marked up with the <sic> tag. The following example demonstrates this:

<line> ... <w type="begin">bren</w></line>
<line><w type="end"><sic corr="hin">kin</sic></w> ... </line>

Notes

With the unexpected came a few niggles. Was the orthography of form x intended or not? Might the critical reader think that we had made a mistake? What if a particular example presented a certain peculiarity which we considered ought to be annotated?

The <note> tag came into play in all such cases, and others, where we felt that information should be recorded.

As the following example demonstrates, the <note> tag always occurs within a word tag. And the content of the note is introduced by the text attribute:

<w>brenhin<note text="in a later hand" /></w>