Questions about the etymology model

[Michal MÄchura <462258@mail.muni.cz>]

Hi John,

I have three questions about the etymology module.

Question 1

Is the etymology object type, as a child of entry, necessary? It seems like itâs just a container for a list of etymons (and multi-etymons, and etym descriptions). If itâs just a container for things, then why not get rid of it and attach those things to entry directly? Thatâs how we do it elsewhere in the standard, for example, we donât have a container for senses, we attach each sense directly as a child of entry.

The only reason why etymology might be necessary is if you want to make it possible for dictionary authors to have more than one in a single entry, where eaxch etymology object would represent a different hypothesis about the headwordâs etymology. If this is how you meant it, then fine, but maybe we should say so in the text.

Question 2

Why is etymon allowed to have more than one etymDate, that is, more than one âfrom-untilâ timespan? If an etymon represents one step in the etymological evolution of the headword, then I would imagine that the step lasted for exactly one timespan, not several.

Question 3

Etymons can be grouped into multi-etymons (the multiEtymon object type) to indicate that the headword was derived by combining two etymons. Thatâs fine and makes sense. But then the object model as you have designed it would allow for each etymon inside a multi-etymon to have different timespans (because time is assigned to etymons, not to multi-etymons). This seems unsafe to me, it fails to prohibit a contradiction.

I would propose an alternative object model where we distinguish between timespans and etymons. The etymology of a headword would be a list of timespans, and each timespan would have one or more etymons, where the intended semantics is that if it has more than one, then the etymons were compounded to form the headword:

- entry
    - etymology
        - timespan (from: ... until: ...)
            - etymon: ...
        - timespan (from: ... until: ...)
            - etymon: ...
        - timespan (from: ... until: ...)
            - etymon: ...
            - etymon: ...