Why/When is it useful to mark up nested quotes?

[tombogle]

The existing Glyssen Character Verse control file mostly just includes the characters who speak first-level quotes. For example, if a passage is a parable being spoken by Jesus, we just have "Jesus" as the character ID, not the individual characters in the parable. So there is no "Prodigal son" character. In most of the prophetic books, there are a large number of passages where it says things like, "God said to Isaiah, 'Speak to the people, saying, "Thus says the Lord, 'Why do you say, "Who is God?"'"'" In those cases, we will typically have both God and Isaiah listed as speakers because there are a number of different ways that different languages and Bible versions handle the nesting and in the end it is often a matter of style (or blindly applying a set of rules) to figure out which voice actor should speak each part. Similarly, it is a matter of style whether it might sometimes make sense to have a hypothetical character jump in and speak a part rather than have God, the prophet or the narrator do it. (Of course, the same is true at some level for characters in a parable. If you were producing a children's audio Bible, you might actually want to dramatize the parables, rather than use Jesus' voice for them.)
For the purpose of preparing a script for audio recording, once you have decided which character is going to speak for the purposes of the recording, it doesn't matter who else is quoted within their speech at deeper nesting levels.
It seems likely that there are times that it would be useful to have a text marked up to indicate deeper nesting levels. Indeed the USFM standard explicitly allows for this. One use is to allow for color-coding nested levels to be able to check them visually and see where quotation marks or milestone markers might have been inadvertently omitted. Another would be for advanced searching (e.g., how many places did Jesus use a particular word where He wasn't quoting someone else or speaking as a character in a parable?).
What other uses are there? Is is worth adding information to a Character Verse file to indicate deeper levels of characters?

[tombogle]

I am now working on the "Enhanced Quotation Checking" feature in Paratext as well as a Paratext plugin, both of which would benefit from having information about the speakers in deeper levels of nested quotes.

[jonathanrobie]

Excellent. Jonathan

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On Mon, Oct 3, 2022 at 8:57 AM Tom Bogle ***@***.***> wrote: I am now working on the "Enhanced Quotation Checking" feature in Paratext as well as a Paratext plugin, both of which would benefit from having information about the speakers in deeper levels of nested quotes. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#18 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AANPTPIKXRJ533CCZE2XYR3WBLJ5DANCNFSM5QNWIGLQ> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: <Freely-Given-org/Bible_speaker_identification/repo-discussions/18/comments/3787285 @github.com>