Re: Citations: non-page locators placed in front of citation

[M . ‘quintus’ Gülker]

Am Montag, dem 11. Oktober 2021 schrieb Bruce D'Arcus:
> Looks like § is currently mapped to the same as ¶: "paragraph", which
> is indeed incorrect.
>
> https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales/blob/0cc3885f6100e26ac6c6d103efa6f3d7195fd21b/locales-de-DE.xml#L210

This is interesting. Pandoc -- which I thought relies on these files? --
outputs the expected § sign. For

    Das ist ein Test [@saenger2013gsr, § 12 Rn. 488].

it yields

    Saenger, Gesellschaftsrecht, 2. Aufl. (2013), § 12 Rn. 488↩

which is what I would have expected. The issue appears to be in the way
§ is interpreted in the text input.

After reading the locales-de-DE.xml file, I suspect a case of lost in
translation. In German, when read out aloud, we spell the “§” character
as “paragraph”. This is evidently different from the English speaker,
who, as I have been told, would read it out as “section”. However, in
fact the German word “Paragraph” translates to “section” in English. The
unit below it is called “Absatz” in German -- in English, it would be
“paragraph”. That is:

| English   | German    | German Short form |
|-----------+-----------+-------------------|
| Section   | Paragraph | §                 |
| Paragraph | Absatz    | Abs.              |

At least, when it comes to legal contexts. As it always is the case with
language, meaning can vary be context. If I talk about sections of a
novel, in German it would be “Abschnitt” rather than “Paragraph”. But
that’s not something one would cite. If I really would need to cite a
novel, I would cite it either by chapter or by page number (with line
number, if necessary).

There is no symbolic sign to my knowledge to denote the unit below § in
German. The locales-de-DE.xml files suggests ¶. That might actually be
valid in some discipline, but we do not use that in jurisprudence. I do
not see a problem with it; it can be left in. What needs to change is
the part of org that maps § to CSL's "paragraph". § needs to be mapped
to "section" instead.

Long story short: I do not think that it is a bug in locales-de-DE.xml,
and I guess Pandoc proves my point here. Please map § to "section"
instead of "paragraph" in org-cite, i.e., do it the way Pandoc does it.

  -quintus


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