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

MusicBrainz Style
, ,
21

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.

22

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.

23

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

24

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.

7 Likes
25

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).

4 Likes
26

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?

27

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.

2 Likes
28

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:

3 Likes
29

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.

3 Likes
30

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”.

31

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.

32

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. ‖ ⁝ ⁞ ⁛ ↔ ⇝

33

If tilde alone is not an IT character? Where is it used in English?
Why wave dash shouldn’t be used because of its block?
The letter A is not in a CJK block, but it is still extensively used in Japanese, same as the number 2. :wink:

34

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde#Common_use

Okay you may now say that at least for some of these use cases, there are more appropriate characters… which is true… but just as you argue with “artist intent”, I could do so as well, who knows that someone didn’t want to use TILDE to remind to typewriter times? Maybe the artists of the Castle in the sky soundtrack thought that during the time the movie plays, there were no computers, but only typewriters, and thus he also uses characters that would have been used in that era, to produce an album layout which matches the movie.

Sure, this is not specific English, but it’s also not more specific to other languages.

Long story short, TILDE is pretty neutral, which actually makes it more appropriate (but IMHO less than SWUNG DASH) in this case than WAVE DASH.

Well simply because that’s what (and how) the character is defined for.
If you argue that the block doesn’t care, than why should one use MINUS rather than HYPHEN-MINUS for the minus character?
Why shouldn’t one be allowed to use the cryllic А instead of the latin A? The look all the same, and when we ignore the block, that would be fine either.

But you make up things as you like… it is in fact common for Japanese to use Latin/English characters - but it’s not common to use Japanese characters/punctuation-rules/etc. in English or other western languages/scripts.

1 Like
35

Yeah? Well… that’s just… like, your opinion, man… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

3 Likes
36

I humbly suggest to give this particular issue a rest. :bow:

9 Likes
37

That’s not strictly true, as far as Style goes - Style / Language / Japanese - MusicBrainz

1 Like