After the discussion on the TEI list and the comments on the list, the post and twitter exchanges with @ttasovac, I came back to an old paper of Susanne Alt (http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00110971), which provides an overview of the constraints that could apply to a comprehensive representation of etymological information in a dictionary entry.
Susanne uses the entry “Pamplemousse” from the TLF (Trésor de la Langue Française) to encode the following etymological information:
PAMPLEMOUSSE, subst. masc. […]
Empr. au néerl. pompelmoes, fém., au sens 1 a, qui est prob. comp.de pompel «gros, enlé» et de limoes «citron» (BOULAN, p.148; KÖNIG, pp.159-160). Apparaît d’abord dans des textes fr. qui le donnent comme mot néerl.: 1665 pompelmoes (J. LE CARPENTIER, L’Ambassade de la Compagnie orientale des Provinces Unies… [trad. d’un ouvrage néerl.], II, p.88 ds ARV.); 1666 pompelmous (M. THÉVENOT, Relation de divers voyages curieux… t.3 ds KÖNIG).
At the end of paper, following an in-depth discussion of etymons and links, which I advise you all to read, she suggests the following encoding:
(i.e. the lexical entry pamplemousse and its direct etymon pompelmoes) of the data structure in a TeI like format. Note that the basic building blocks for the characterization of a lexical entry (<form> and <sense>) are completely reus- able for the description of an etymon, and the language has been implemented as a standardized xml:lang attribute.
<lexicalEntry id=”LE1″>
<form>
<orth>pamplemousse</orth> …
</form>
<sense>… </sense>
<etymology> <etymon id=”LE2″>
<form> <orth xml:lang=”dutch”>pompelmoes</orth> <pos>commonNoun</pos> <gender>feminine</gender>
</form> <sense>
<glose>Citrus maxima</glose>
<note>probablement d’origine tamoule, De Vries, Nederl</note> </sense>
</etymon> <etymologicalLink source=”LE2″ target=”LE1″>
<etymologicalClass>loan word</etymologicalClass> </etymologicalLink>
</etymology> </lexicalEntry>
If we “modernize” this proposal to make it as close to a TEI compliant entry, we could think of something as follows:
<entry xml:id=”LE1″>
<form>
<orth>pamplemousse … </form>
<sense>…
<etym>
<re type=”etymon” xml:id=”LE2″>
<form>
<orth xml:lang=”dutch”>pompelmoes</orth>
<gramGrp>
<pos>commonNoun</pos>
<gen>feminine</gen>
</gramGrp>
</form>
<sense>
<gloss>Citrus maxima</gloss>
<note>probablement d’origine tamoule, De Vries, Nederl</note>
</sense>
</re>
<link type=”loanWord” target=”#LE2 #LE1″/>
</etym>
</entry>
This is a little more ambitious than what was discussed in the previous post and related comments, but seems to follow what Toma Tasovac had in mind with an embedded entry in the description of the etymological content.