When I went back to work on the phar file, a number of questions came up. I raise them below:

In late April (26/04/07) we had an exchange about gloss tags. I asked whether we want to be able to access glosses in dictegs to construct the English-Nx wordlist. Martin replied that he had not envisioned that we would do so, and that therefore only the system of segs and glosses that occurs within the sense part of the entry is the one that will be searched for the English-Nx wordlist. Martin also asked if there is any good reason to take material from the illustrations for the English-Nx glossary. I didn’t have an answer to this last question at the time, but I think I have one now.

The following is a set of four connected entries based on the root, ʕʷə́cˀ, which can serve to exemplify my answer. Kinkade did not provide a gloss for this root, so in the entry for the root itself, there is no definition available. Similarly for the entry that consists of this root plus the STAT suffix -t, there is no definition available, but there is an illustration. The other two entries connected to this root do have definitions.

<entry xml:id="ʕWəcˀ">
<form>
<pron><seg>ʕʷə́cˀ</seg></pron>
<hyph><m>ʕʷə́cˀ</m></hyph>
</form>
<sense>
<def><!-- No definition available. --></def>
</sense>

<xr>See <ref target="yəcˀp">yə́cˀp</ref><note>worn down to the end</note></xr>
</entry>

<entry xml:id="ʕWəcˀt">
<form>
<pron><seg>ʕʷə́cˀt</seg></pron>
<hyph>√<m sameAs="ʕWəcˀ">ʕʷə́cˀ</m>‐<m sameAs="STAT">t</m></hyph>
</form>
<sense>
<def><seg><!-- No definition available. --></seg></def>
<dicteg>
<cit><quote>ʕʷə́c't ʔeɬxʷənčút<gloss>out of breath</gloss></quote><bibl>Y40.177</bibl></cit>
</dicteg>
</sense>
</entry>

<entry xml:id="ʕWə́cˀp">
<form>
<pron><seg>ʕʷə́cˀp</seg></pron>
<hyph>√<m sameAs="ʕWə́cˀ">ʕʷə́cˀ</m>‐<m sameAs="ʔ">p</m></hyph>
</form>
<sense>
<def><seg>worn down to the end</seg></def>
</sense>
<bibl>Y34.34</bibl>
</entry>

<entry xml:id="ʕWəcˀpaskˀáyˀt">
<form>
<pron><seg>ʕʷəcˀpaskˀáyˀt</seg></pron>
<hyph>√<m sameAs="ʕWə́cˀ">ʕʷə́cˀ</m>‐<m sameAs="inch">p</m>=<m sameAs="askˀáyˀt">askˀáyˀt</m></hyph>
</form>
<sense>
<def><seg>ran out of breath</seg></def>
</sense>
<bibl>JM3.73.7</bibl>
</entry>

If the English-Nx wordlist only looks at material within the sense tags to determine membership in the English-Nx wordlist, then the stative form, which has a dicteg, but no filled in gloss within sense tags will be missed.
Question 1: Is this a problem?
Questions 2-4: For the English-Nx wordlist, how do we handle roots that have no gloss? Should I provide a gloss, based on interpreting the available forms. And if I do that, should the ECH-interpreted gloss be marked as such, as opposed to it being an attested gloss?
Question 5: If we look at the glosses for the last two of the four entries above, we see that one is ‘worn down to the end’ and the other is ‘ran out of breath’. What is the best way to mark-up these glosses?
I envision two possibilities (at least):
(a) I could use the seg/gloss mark-up to do the following:
<def><seg><gloss>worn down</gloss> to the end</seg></def>
<def><seg>ran <gloss>out of</gloss> breath</seg></def>
This mark-up foregrounds what seem to be those parts of the senses that the two definitions have in common.
(b) I could provide a general and identical interpreted definition for the two forms: e.g. Here I highlight the general nature of the definition by putting it in caps.
<def><seg><gloss>WEAR OUT, RUN OUT</gloss> worn down to the end</seg></def>
<def><seg> <gloss> WEAR OUT, RUN OUT </gloss>ran out of breath</seg></def>

I would be grateful for your thoughts on these questions Martin.

Xml mark-up documentation:
1. The xml mark-up documentation does not include information about how we are using segs and glosses within defs to distinguish those parts of the definition that the English-Nx wordlist needs to search, as opposed to those which parts of the definition which it does not need to search.

2. I don’t think the latest version of the xml mark-up documentation is sufficiently clear on what we are doing with cross-references. For example, it is not clear that in the cross-references, because we are referring to the xml:ids of the xr forms, we do not actually need to supply the English meanings of those forms.