Aristotle's De Anima

The J. A. Smith translation, with Bekker numbers and without.

Transcript of an email discussion:

• pdf
• ps
• dvi
• tex

The emails are converted (by hand) into a LaTeX file by (some of) the actions listed below.

• Paragraphs must be separated by (one or more) blank lines.
• The standard symmetrical double-quote-mark (") is changed to an grave accent or an apostrophe (` or '), depending on whether it begins or ends a quote. These marks can be doubled, as needed; but if, say, a doubled apostrophe is followed by a single, then a pair of braces {} should intervene, as in

  `I said ``Now!''{}'

  The style I have adopted uses single marks first (or outermost). (I use double-quotes in web-pages, since the single ones don't look good in my so-called ‘browser’.)
• If quotations are distinguished in emails by (say) angle-brackets, these must be removed or replaced as needed. Block-quotes are distinguished by \dquo{ } if from earlier in the discussion; and \oquo{ }, if from outside. (Why the distinction? I originally thought the internal quotations could be printed smaller to save space. Now I save space mainly by abbreviating or eliminating the internal quotes in favor of a numerical reference to the earlier email.)
• A sequences of dots (used presumably for ellipsis) is changed to the control-sequence \dots; I'm not using any dots next to this.
• Underscores and asterisks are interpreted and replaced:
  • Titles are indicated by \titl{ };
  • emphasized words are indicated by \bem{ } (here “bem” stands for “bold emphasis”, which indicates the style I have adopted);
  • Greek words are indicated by \Gk{ } (Latin letters are interpreted as Greek according to the scheme reproduced in my page “Using Greek in LaTeX”);
  • foreign (“fer'n”) words in Latin letters are indicated by \fern{ }. I treat Latin abbreviations like i.e. and etc. as foreign.
• Abbreviations are considered. TeX (and hence LaTeX) puts more space between sentences than between words. A period after a small letter is interpreted as ending a sentence; if it merely ends an abbreviation, then it should be followed by a backslash \ and a space. (I don't use a period after “Mr”, holding with Fowler that the period would stand for missing letters.) A period after a capital letter is interpreted as not being the end of a sentence; if it is, then it should be preceded by \@.
• Hyphens and dashes are standardized. TeX interprets:
  • one hyphen as a hyphen;
  • two adjacent hyphens, as an en-dash (a short dash);
  • three adjacent hyphens, as an em-dash (a longer dash).
  I use an en-dash between numbers (as in denoting a range of pages). I use an em-dash as a regular mark of punctuation, distinguishing parenthetical remarks for example. I don't surround it with spaces, since the em-dash that TeX uses is long and thin. (Hyphens and en-dashes generally don't want spaces next to themselves either.)

Ideally, email-writers would distinguish titles and foreign words with underscores, and emphasized words with asterisks; and they would use quote-marks and hyphens as they will appear in the LaTeX file.