OK, guideline now updated. I think I’ve handled the canonical names in alternate languages issue.
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Yes, you did. I see what you did there and I like it.
(Minor issue: “vary in a different languages” → vary in different languages)
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I’ve done another round of minor edits to the proposed guideline. I sense that discussion on this has dropped, so I would like to call for any final comments before submitting as a PR.
Here is a published draft to view how it will look:
https://bookbrainz-user-guide-pbryan.readthedocs.io/en/latest/style/entities/author/
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Only two issues:
You mention “specify the corresponding language of its usage” for aliases and transliterations, but not for canonical names. Is this because you think the language shouldn’t be set? My thinking is that you should specify the language when the name is used in one language only, such as the native names of Chinese or Japanese authors (and probably any language with its own writing system.)
I would also like to remind you of my point above about pseudonyms with their own biography and specific projects. I think this belongs here, and it’s relevant for several authors I care about.
Typo: its pronounciation → its pronunciation
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it does say “canonical name in its original language and script” but we can make it clearer that the language should be explicitly specified.
That’s somewhat different from what I’ve been doing in practice. I’ve been selecting the language that the canonical name is evidently written in. In many cases, it’s obvious when a German name is given to a German person, English name to English person, etc. In some cases where it’s been ambiguous, I’ve left it as [Multiple Languages] but to date that hasn’t sat well with me.
Yes, thanks, that didn’t get resolved. As you pointed out originally, we don’t even have an author–author relationship for that today. So we I think would need to agree on these points:
- Common personas should warrant their own author in BB.
- We should add a new relationship to link a persona to the person.
- Maybe we should have a new persona author type?
Resolving this might take some time, and if so, I wonder if we should defer publishing the guideline until it’s resolved, or decide to proceed and revise upon resolution?
Well, two years ago the relationship (“is a pen name of)” still existed as a remnant of an older concept (based on the MB concept I supposd, which I don’t like at all, by the way).
This relationship was deleted because we did not want this concept for BB.
See this thread: Pen-names as aliases or as separate entries
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OK, so the status quo right now is no pen names. @blackteadarkmatter can you make a case for (re-)adding personas?
@indy133, I read the whole thread and I actually agree with everything you said there (and here). As far as I can see, all the examples there are for common pseudonyms/pen names, i.e. different names the same person uses to sign their works. I also think the best way to deal with this is to add the pseudonyms as aliases, and to mark the usage with a “credited as” attribute.
What I’m suggesting here is for cases when the pseudonym isn’t just an alternative name, but the name of an alternative (fictional — though this may not be known by the reader) persona, with not only their own name, but their own biography (date of birth, gender, life experiences, personal relationships, etc.) and their own distinctive style. — It’s only these that I think should have their own author entity.
Maybe the pen name relationship could have been repurposed for this, but it’s a different situation.
Yes, but if we decide this is the way to go, we can just add an annotation until the relationship becomes available.
I don’t think this is necessary, as long as we have the author-author relationship and it is clearly displayed. (I’m not against it, either; just feel it’s not necessary.)
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That’s interesting because it’s the exact opposite of what I have been doing. My natural tendency is to just select the language of the author. (If it is a Spanish author, select Spanish, if it’s an English author, select English, etc.) But now I think that doesn’t make much sense. So Cervantes is a Spanish author, but what is then his name is English? Or Portuguese? Or French? Cervantes is just a person’s name and is used in any language that used the Latin script, not just Spanish. So Cervantes is the author’s name in [Multiple Languages]. And my original MO becomes absurd when the author’s name isn’t necessarily connected to on specific language or is connected to multiple languages — which is increasingly common. Almeida Garrett is a Portuguese author, but one of his surnames, Garrett, is English (Irish), the other is Portuguese. Before I selected Portuguese, but now I think that is wrong.
Basically, I think it doesn’t make sense to pick one language when the name will be used, unchanged, by the speakers of dozens of languages. — And, again, this is exactly the opposite of what I have been doing.
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I think it would be informative to show that the same name is identical in English and in German. In works, we allow multi-select language. Maybe it makes sense to have that everywhere? [Multiple languages] really doesn’t work for me because it’s ambiguous about what languages are involved.
yes, but could you give an example, wher such a persona survived the death of the author?
If J. K. Rowling died this year, what do you think would happen to Robert Galbraith?
I’ll bet (unless a last will of J.K. prevents it) the publishers will use the name that sells best. Maybe for a certain period there would be both names on the cover. But then…
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I think it’s just OK to use “ml” for nearly all latin written languages. It’s impossible to locate all the languages that use a certain name variant. I only use specific languages for languages with their own notation (Russian, Chinese etc.)
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Even with languages that use Latin character sets, their spelling can vary widely. So [ml] gives us no assurance that it can be used appropriately in any particular language. If we could select the matching languages (multi-select), it would be far better for editors to affirm what languages are covered by a particular spelling.
Let’s look at an example:
this is just an excerpt of the variants of F.D. There are many variants with just minor differents: “y”, “i” “ij”. And now think abouth how these spelling changed over the last hundred years in many countries. Do you really think it’s necessary to assign every variant to all the languages where they ever appeared? I’m not sure if I understand the importance of such a big task.
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I don’t think an editor is expected to exhaustively catalog every variant in every language. I think an editor should be able to tag a specific language to a specific spelling. In the FD example, I would tag the spelling “Fyodor Dostoevsky” with English. Someone could later tag Somali for the same spelling. [ML] just says that it’s spelled that way in some language. I would value knowing at least what language(s) that includes.
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Yes, I get that, but for me that is pure luxury in the current state of the db. I hope you’ll agree if we postpone this feature to the future 
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I agree today all we have is [ML]. If it makes sense to us here though, I’d like to file a request to make it multi-select, so that, you know, one day… 
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I don’t think we have to future-proof author entities — BB isn’t set in stone. I really don’t know if the Robert Galbraith pseudonym will survive Rowling’s death, or, say, a century after. Besides, I don’t think that is particularly relevant. What is more relevant to me is the author’s intent. She is alive and intends for these books to be attributed to Galbraith, not her.
It’s true that I don’t know many examples, but I’m sure many will exist in world literature.
Pessoa’s heteronyms are good examples, you can find recently books by his main heteronyms in most European languages. The list Other writers and their heteronyms list on the same page may provide other examples.
What often happens is that Pessoa’s name will also appear (as “heteronym of”, or in parentheses, or added below or above the heteronym’s name etc.), that may be also what will happen with Robert Galbraith, but I can’t really say.
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On the language issue, I agree with everything @indy133 said here. I understand the value specifying the languages, but not of setting just one. What is the value of setting Fyodor Dostoevsky as English? What’s English about it? To be valuable you would have to add this name as an alias for dozens, possibly hundreds of languages… which wouldn’t even work in our current set up.
I understand your point, @pbryan, and there’s some value in it, but I don’t think this is the best way. Maybe in the future we can have a separate system to define names by locales, maybe by ISO code, to be used for internationalization — because it’s not even just languages, the same author in now by different names in Taiwan (zh-TW) and in the PRC (zh-CN), for example, thought both would be Chinese. But to quote @indy133:
I hope you’ll agree if we postpone this feature to the future
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If ISO 639 language codes are the way to go, I’d be fine pushing for it to go in that direction. I’d like us to push it in some direction though, because settling for [ML] for the long term seems nearly as useful as specifying no language at all.