How should we format glosses on linguistics.SE?

Question

What will be our best choice of formatting for including glosses of foreign language samples in our questions?

Answer 1

I usually writes the translation under the quotation, between quotes, and the gloss between them, in roman, as in

Gwenn eo ar c'haz
White is the cat
“The cat is white”

Slashes and dashes may be used for compound words

Bayerische Seenschifffahrt
Bavarian / lakes-shipping
“Bavarian lakes shipping”¹

^{1. This is probably not the best example I could come with, but the triple f made me do it anyway :).}

Answer 2

Someone asked about rendering glosses in HTML on linguistics.SE, so there's some worthwhile discussion going on there.

Naturally, I'm biased toward my own suggestion. :) But in all seriousness, the approach I describe there does have the advantage of being encode-able with markup that the SE software already supports (embedded lists). However, in order to get it to render in such a way that it looks like a gloss, there would have to be a way for this particular site (linguistics.SE) to edit its CSS file, and then, I suppose, secondarily, some way to tell Markdown that the <ol> (or whatever people ended up settling on, hypothetically) should have a class of .gloss or something like that.

I have no idea if both of those are possible, but I thought I'd throw out the possibility.

Answer 3

A common glossing convention is the Leipzig Glossing Rules.

Unfortunately it mandates horizontal alignments that are difficult to achieve in plain Markdown.

As a workaround, you can write the gloss as a code block (indent by 4 spaces), as in The stylistic effect of chiasmus in Latin:

sidere         mens           eadem          mutato
star-SG.N.ABL  mind-SG.F.NOM  same-SG.F.NOM  change-SG.N.ABL

But this prevents you from using formatting.