Artist Nashenas/ناشناس (Sadiq Fitrat Habibi) was born in Afghanistan in 1935. He has been living among the Afghan diaspora outside his country since 1990 after escaping to Pakistan, and is currently believed to be currently residing in London, England.
He has recorded in Afghanistan (from the 1950s), India, Pakistan, USA and UK.
What is an acceptable name for this artist in the database?
ناشناس ?
(500K google hits)
If a transliterated version is to be used then which?
Nashenas? (as found on some releases and 300K google hits)
Nashnas? As used by the artist at his apparent official site and with 100K google hits?
That website doesn’t look very official, but who knows? If the man himself uses Nashnas, I think that is the transliteration we should use. Just like Rachmaninoff is spelled with two f’s instead of a v on MusicBrainz, because that’s the way he wrote his own name. Of course Nashenas should be an alias.
I agree, but am not sure what the right artist name would be for those who use their native (e.g. arabic) and an international (latin) version alternatively.
When my asbestos underwear finally arrives, I’m going to rename Wolfgang Mozart to how he wrote his own name.
Joking aside, it’s not always a simple black-and-white issue. Artist intent is a strong indicator, but not the be-all and end-all.
I’ve got the firm impression that the word
ناشناس
(meaning = unknown), which the artist originally used to hide his identity, has multiple transliterations.
Nashenas, Nashinas, Nashenaas, Naashenas, Nashnas, …
The first transliteration is by far the most common on cover art. Then there is Nashnas.com - I have no evidence either way that it is the artist - beside the website content itself.
Looking for such evidence has me asking,
EDIT: The search is progressing well.
(Current edit waiting for approval will change artist name to commonest transliteration (Nashenas). Then I await future discoveries. As the wise Jesus2099 said, “It is not really wrong, it has yet to be completed, isn’t it?”)
Pulling up random Mozart works on IMSLP until I found one where he wrote his name on it… that appears to be “Wolfgang Mozart” (from K. 257). Though he apparently likes blots on his letters, so maybe he’s Wolfgango .
Completely off-topic, but I’m curious what else he used…
Which isn’t entirely correct either, it is not necessarily exactly one letter. Rather each letter has a well defined replacement (e.g. cyrillic щ → šč), whereas a transcription tries to mimic the pronunciation.
Right, those exist but have the problem of being ambiguous (šč could stand for щ or for шч, because ш is represented as š and ч as č), which makes it much less useful. (Some definitions wouldn’t accept that as a transliteration.) For that reason, the ISO transliteration system for Cyrillic (ISO 9) has used ŝ for щ since its 1986 revision.
.
