Anyone familiar with wave dash or Japanese? Could use some help on an edit

It is utterly deplorable that they had to do this.
It is like how they have added lots of off screen voice explaining tons of things in Mononoke intro when there is absolutely no need.
And they even changed the roles of those characters in the intro IIRC.
It was not that a problem to me as I look at original versions but as Dusney translated their French subtitles from American, it makes no sense watching. Although cinema release had proper French subtitles from Japanese… :frowning:

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After this, I believe I’m out of points to present—so one last try:

If the artist intended to use it, then our first style principal is follow artist intent.

We correct typos, spelling errors, etc., yes. Correcting ' to (though really, its often right on the album—and the style guideline to use proper Unicode punctuation instead of the ASCII versions is at least as much about not being lazy when entering the data—it’s much easier for most people to type " vs. .

But if an artist intentionally used ASCII quotes, or even TeX-style ``quotes’', then we’d preserve that (e.g., maybe its an album of songs about mathematics, and the liner notes tell us that TeX-style quotes were used on purpose).

But a lot of this seems moot point: You’re not arguing we should correct it according to (a) standard written English. You’re arguing we should make/keep it wrong in a different way: Neither tilde nor any tilde-like character has any use in English that’d make sense in that track listing. In English, a title and subtitle are separated by a colon; multiple works (at least here) by a slash; and different tempo markings used as names by an en- or em-dash.

I think there is a fairly strong argument that it is:

  • There is a tilde-like mark on the page. It appears to be part of the track title (and not some stray decorative mark, etc.). I think we all agree on both of these.
  • The composer (& artist we credit with the work), is Japanese and presumably speaks Japanese. In addition, Wikipedia lists one of his other occupations as typesetting… so it’s pretty safe to presume he’s familiar with Japanese punctuation.
  • The release was for sale in Japan. As evidence, I offer that (a) the release has plentiful Japanese text; (b) the promotional material on the obi (both front and the ad for an upcoming release on the back) is in Japanese; (c) the price is given in yen; (d) to buy it I had to import it from Japan. [d is obviously the weakest of these.]
  • People in Japan (where it was sold, see above) can, I think, be presumed to familiar with Japanese punctuation.
  • There does not exist any English punctuation that makes sense in that context. Tilde (of any sort) is barely used in English at all, mainly being used to say “approximately five” as “~5”. It is also, according to Wikipedia, used in a special way in dictionaries (which this is plainly not).
  • The usage of wave dash matches with what we see on the album.

That, to me, is not pure speculation. It’s a pretty convincing case. Especially when there is no evidence to the contrary.

However, just to be sure, I went and did some more research. I found the album on the composer’s web site. He uses as wave dash on this release’s discography page. (Given his lack of spacing around parentheses, I don’t think he really understands English punctuation, though…)

Sure, maybe he has an underpaid web designer who randomly changes the composer’s tildes to wave dashes, maybe he enjoys using English punctuations in nonsensical ways to confuse his audience, etc. But then, maybe the release isn’t actually “Castle in the Sky”; it could be “Ⅽаѕtⅼе іη tҺе ՏkУ”. How do you know that C isn’t really Ⅽ (the Roman numeral for 100)? Makes as much sense there as tilde does in the titles.

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I understand all your points, as well as why you prefer WAVE DASH.
Plus, in our conversation in the original edit, I’ve even said that I’m not really happy with TILDE or SWUNG DASH either.

However, regardless of all this, my argument is as simple as:
The surrounding text determines that language, and both the track titles in question and all other track titles either are English. I don’t see how one could dispute that so far.
And this is simply the point why I think WAVE DASH is the least perfect solution, simply because of it’s “special meaning” for Japanese punctuation.

Unicode even sets that character into the group “CJK symbols and punctuation” (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U3000.pdf), but there are no CJK characters at all.

What the writer/composer may have intended or not is IMO difficult to say… the guideline you quote would only count here if we’d really know that he intentionally wanted to mix English wish Japanese punctuation for whatever interesting reason. But whether this is the case or not doesn’t seem to be proven by him using the same on the website. It’s at least as likely - if not more - that he simply did it because he’s used to that character by his Japanese origin.
Just the same as millions of tracks use ’ or " simply because people don’t know better and not because they really thought: “well, typographically this is wrong, but I still do it because I’m want to protest against society”.

If there’d be an album whose songs are bout DEK and TeX and TeX-style ``quotes’’ are used in that, than I’d say there’s enough reason to believe that’s by intention.
But some Japanese author using WAVE DASH seems rather to be because he’s used to that by his own language’s typographical and punctuation rules and simply didn’t knoe that WAVE DASH is not meant for English.
Just as 99% people don’t know that it’s not " or '.

TILDE and SWUNG DASH aren’t much better, admittedly,… but neither of them has that strong connection to CJK punctuation.
Both are either in the “C0 Controls and Basic Latin” respectively “General Punctuation” Unicode block, making them pretty general in contrast to WAVE DASH.
SWUNG DASH, at least according to the Unicode chart, has no special use, so it seems to be more or less a neutral dash character that is simply not straight but swung.
While TILDE has some more or less generally accepted use cases (as you mention above)… it’s also used in many other areas (especially within computing) making it pretty “neutral” again. And the typical use cases (“approximately”, and diacritical stuff) have all more appropriate characters and TILDE’s use for these is rather historic/legacy as is eg U+0022 QUOTATION MARK’s.

Anyway,… I don’t think we’ll reach consensus here, since at least currently a majority is on your side in terms of voting, it’s IMO not necessary to discuss this any further, at least not from my side.

Best wishes,
Chris.

Cheers,
Chris.

Just to answer some of @calestyo concerns about this is not a Japanese release and we could use other available tildes:

It is a Japanese edition, Japanese customs are using wave dash (nami dash exactly 波ダッシュ in JIS) for subtitles, versions and multiple title style.

ASCII tilde does not achieve the same effect as it is half shorter and will sometimes display on top of the character box instead of middle.
ASCII tilde was available in JIS but still they did use 波ダッシュ specifically.
Other tildes (including full width tilde) may have wrong shape or direction.

FTR Japanese usually use wave dash for two purposes.

  1. To separate multiple titles on one track (be it medley, or anything else). A〜B〜C (usually no spaces when Japanese characters are used, with or without spaces when Latin characters are used)
  2. To enclose a subtitle (they will either use wave dash or en dash or even em dash). A 〜abc〜
  3. They may also rarely use 〜 instead of the normal long vowel bar to give special funny feeling but then it is no longer used as a separator/punctuation, it is another topic.

Why not using wave dash, then? :wink:

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You keep hacking at this straw man… Nobody here argues that, though. The argument made by me and others is, that this is a release for the Japanese market. That’s why Japanese style should apply. Not because it’s recorded/mastered/pressed wherever.

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Weeeell, as you probably know, support for the correct form of the wave dash is also not universal due to Unicode blunder.

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/301c/fontsupport.htm

This weakens the position for the wave dash somewhat, but I still think it’s the best choice here.

I know that issue with the initial wrong direction of the Unicode WAVE DASH sample sheet that lead to first Unicode font implementations being wrong.
But this was a mistake (progressively being fixed in all sensible implémentations); the WAVE DASH is the mapping for JIS 波ダッシュ in any case, even on computers that still have wrong fonts like mine (Windows XP). :slight_smile:

Given that people in favour of WAVE DASH, argue mostly based on the album being allegedly Japanese, could you please then also adapt the language to Japanese?

Especially the WAVE DASH will have wrong looks, given that it was drawn differently until Unicode 8.0 and all fonts I know still follow that (though I have reported bugs against some of them).

As I wrote above, because the language is English.

That’s kinda illogical, and we have no single rules which mandate to apply language styles/rules depending on which market an album is supposedly intended for.
If some album is made for e.g. Germany, but is completely English in it’s language (as it’s basically the case for 99,9% soundtrack sold in Germany), you’d then need to use German punctuation!? Stupid.

Punctuation/typographical rules are determined by the language being used. Not by what some people are convinced to be the intended market.
Also an album like this is pretty much rather rare and not highly demanded around the world, which is the likely the reason why there is only one, namely the Japan edition.

If you show me the rule that says, the “intended market” or the currency of a price tag decides the language (regardless of what it actually is) and subsequently the typographical rules and punctuation, than I’ll happily vote for WAVE DASH.

Tilde is not (MB) English style either, anyway. :information_desk_person:

As far as I can tell you’re trying to apply a style that doesn’t exist. The release is what it is and there are no guidelines I am aware of to say the punctuation should be restricted to the set historically associated with a particular language. The relevant guidelines are https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Language/English which says “For releases by Japanese artists that contain track names in English, follow the indications on the Japanese guidelines.” The only other potentially relevant guideline would be https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Titles#Subtitles for track 1, which says “If there is an alternative dividing punctuation mark … use that mark instead of the colon.”

There is good rationale presented for wave dashes to be what was intended and used for these titles (the release was intended to be read by Japanese people and the use of the punctuation is consistent with how wave dash would be used in Japanese) and no rationale for these being tildes.

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I don’t think anyone is arguing for that. I’m not. What I do argue for, though, is: Look at the album.

If it has quotes “like these”, then you enter it in with quotes “like these”.
If it has quotes »like these«, then you enter it in with quotes »like these«.
if it’s « like this », then you enter it with quotes « like this ».
If it’s ¸like this“, then you enter ¸Like this“.

If it were a mix of them, not done consistently (e.g., two different track listings in the same release use different quotations for the same track, or different printings do different quotes, etc.) then use quotes “like these” as that’s standard for printed English.

We correct typos (on one release, left a letter out of a word). We correct correct laziness and/or lack of knowledge about typesetting (e.g., " to “). We correct things that are generally graphic-design choices—unless we believe the artist cares—to make our database more consistent (e.g., capitalization in English if a track list is in all caps). We change things due to technical limitations in MusicBrainz (e.g., there isn’t a better way to show track grouping than prefixing each member of the group with the group name—putting the work name in front per CSG is one example).

We don’t generally change things because we disagree with the artist(s) over how it’s proper to use the language(s).

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As I’ve said previously… if you argue like that, then you cannot change ‘…’, “…” or anything else either, because you have no idea whether this may have been exactly the characters the artist may have wanted.
You couldn’t change the hyphen/hyphen-minus to en/em-dash either, because from the length it’s neither of them.

There are two ways to go:

  1. either one follows the characters exactly as they’re printed, taking over wrong apostrophes, double quotes and even typos (how do you know the artist didn’t intend to make the typo, just for the fun of it?)
    OR
  2. we correct based rules like grammar, spelling, typography or punctuation

but you cannot just pick as you want and take for English releases (1) and for ones made/sold in JP (2).

If you decide for (1), fine, but then everywhere, and all the other releases that got their apostrophes, etc. corrected would need to be changed back.
If you decide for (2), then because grammar, spelling, typography and punctuation depend on language/script, you must base your corrections on language/script.
In this particular case the language/script is English/Latin, whether it was made by some Japanese guy or not. Thus, English/Latin grammar/punctuation/etc. need to be applied. Thus WAVE DASH seems from.

Or wouldn’t you correct a misspelled:

Prologue ~ Flaptors Atack

to

Prologue ~ Flaptors Attack

either and argue: weeeellll… no this is from Japan, so we don’t apply English rules here?

I think we are in both 1 and 2 by using wave dash.
We are in case 1 because it happens to be printed (but with no mistakes) and in case 2 by using the appropriate characters.
It is the semantic of those characters, their definition.
Wave dash is used for those enclosing as well as links, chains. Not tilde, which is a rather IT character (even more than typewriter quotes and apostrophe).
Like en and em dashes are used (choose according to size) for enclosing or separate, not hyphen minus, not hyphen.
Hyphen is used to link words.
Minus is used for maths.
And so on and so forth.

The use of wave dash comes from Japan indeed where it has been used extensively. But English is not using tilde (nor any other wavy dash) as far as I know.
We are not that much editing with language in mind, as @derobert said, just using appropriate characters IMO.

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Interesting discussion, everyone has some valid points, unfortunately yours @calestyo aren’t quite as convincing.

Since when has MB operated like this?
As far as I know we change things if we suspect them to be mistakes and leave them if we suspect them to be intentional. If it’s English or not has no bearing on this at all.
It seems like in this case there’s at least some evidence for artist intent.

[quote=“calestyo, post:26, topic:67613”]
(how do you know the artist didn’t intend to make the typo, just for the fun of it?)
[/quote]If it’s shown that they consistently spell it with a typo, ‘for the fun of it’ or any other identifiable artist intent, I would definitely expect MB to include that typo.

Not sure in what cases we correct grammar, but I’ll take your word from it… maybe stay away from rap releases tho :stuck_out_tongue:

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There is at least a third: You bring with you your knowledge of the language(s) involved, the artists involved, the release involved, do what research you can—and then make a judgment over whether something that doesn’t follow the norms of the language(s) is intentional by the artist or not.

PS: Neither of your two rules seems to result in using a tilde-like character other than wave dash; your rule two would seem to suggest using either a wave dash or a colon.

PPS: English has no formal standard; it’s defined by usage, and that varies depending on where its being used. Seems like if you were going to pick your #2 it’d make sense to edit to the usage in the region where the release was. E.g., you’d leave a British release as colour, and an American one as color. And you’d need to find out if English as used in Japan features wave dash.

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Both cannot apply at the same time… here, as the WAVE DASH is incorrect for English language per se.

In Japanese, but not in English (or any other non-Japanese language).

Calling this an IT character is simply plain wrong… it has, amongst many other, some typical uses in computing, but this actually makes TILDE much more “neutral” and not specific for any purpose, like WAVE DASH is for Japanese (not English) punctuation.

I don’t think it “comes from”, which would imply that it’s at least somewhat used in other languages (particularly English in our case) as well, but I’ve seen no indication on that. In fact, the whole description of the Unicode character, especially it’s group, makes it likely Japanese-only, thus wrong for our case here.

You just said it would be an IT character, which makes it pretty English-centric as most of computing comes from that.
Also, it’s a part of the basic latin plane… why would it have been that, if it wasn’t used in English?
Of course not necessarily in English prose…

Well but by that you take any decision in your own hands, deciding on your own, and not based on factual rules what’s right and what’s wrong.
Which goes so far here in this disturbing discussion, that a clearly English-language album gets non-English punctuation rules applied… o.O

I guess the effective outcome of this whole thread and the decision made is, that language, grammar, punctuation rules are applied based on where an album was made, respectively where the artists come from.
Since the guidelines have not yet been adopted to that, could someone please do so?
Otherwise I’d always have to point back on this discussion when making edits based on this new “rules”.

Well usually we follow guidelines (which here clearly say: language=English, script=latin … and deducing from that, that a Japanese/non-latin-script-specific character (the CJK-indented WAVE DASH) would be appropriate seems to be a pretty questionable thing).

As I’ve said previously, if there would be any clear proof that this is the authors intent, I wouldn’t say anything.
But there isn’t. The only thing is “he’s from Japan”,… great.
That would force use to accept every wrong apostrophe ', doublequote ", etc. from any guy in western countries, as these characters are used there by most people (wrong or not), and thus it may be what the artist has intended.

This is actually proved further by the fact, that back then when this album was made, Unicode mandated still the old form of the glyph… to date I found no western font which (even now) has change to the non-erroneous form, wouldn’t an Japanese artist, that clearly wanted WAVE DASH, has seen that this is wrong and used the correct one from a Japanese font?

So I cannot see any special reason for artist intent of WAVE DASH - apart from some people here claiming to know what the artist’s intent may have been (again, just based on his origin). Quite weak… and if this is allowed, than any editor can come along and say he knows what was meant and thereby justify any edits he likes.

I think “consistently” alone isn’t enough… especially not for questions of punctuations (most albums use consistently ’ instead of ’ for the apostrophe, which doesn’t make it “intended”).
Same, IMHO for typos… just because all tracks would use e.g. “Harry Poter” ALONE doesn’t mean that this is intentional (unless perhaps the album is about a parody), but it rather means that e.g. someone copy&pasted the typo.

Which I don’t think is the case here… the only reason for using WAVE dash is “made in Japan” + “Japanese artist” + “the claim to allegedly know that this was artist intent”, completely ignoring/breaking much stronger and neutrally applicable rules: the language of the release, which is English, which in turn has AFAICS no commonly accepted use case for the WAVE DASH as you want to use it here.

I’ve already answered that previously:
We have no idea whether this character was perhaps meant as just some swung dash or a ornamental dingbat character. I could claim that as being the artists intent just as much as you claim his intent was WAVE DASH.

So in addition to WAVE DASH being typographically wrong for English language/latin script… there is IMHO reasonable chances that another dash-like character may have been actually intended.
This could indeed be TILDE, which is pretty “neutral”, as it’s used in English for many different cases (in IT as special character, etc. pp.).
Or even more likely (from a purely typographical PoV, not from whether this was the artists actual thought or not): SWUNG DASH - it’s a swung/wavy dash, just as on the back cover and it has no special meaning for punctuation, which makes it again pretty “neutral” and thus appropriate for English/latin, just as characters like these. ‖ ⁝ ⁞ ⁛ ↔ ⇝