It was like the third physical release tracklisting I looked at, for the record. The two other ones were all caps. Most Brazilian music I listen to is either older MPB or proibidão (not a genre that tends to favor physical releases). I’m going with what I listen to, not trying to find the thing that has sold the most copies.
@finalsummer, you’ve hit the nail on the head! Here’s what I’m saying:
- Let’s stick to the official spelling rules. I’ve already dropped the official documents (PDFs) here as proof.
- Let’s follow what’s most commonly done.
I get it, this might be a bit of a brain teaser to sort out. But remember, these rules are just like the ones for English. Did you know if you hit that “Guess Case” button we have here, it gets it right about 95% of the time? So if you’re working on a Portuguese title and use Guess Case, you’ll be spot on with my proposed cap style most of the time. If we stick with the current cap style, we’ll be off the mark for almost all norms, rules, and common uses in Portuguese.
If actually you read the document you linked there, you will see the section you are quoting is “Acordos ortográficos anteriores” — previous orthographic agreements. In fact, you’re just quoting the 1945 agreement again, which was historically in force in Portugal, but is no longer valid. You really should read the document you cite as support — or at least the title. There is only one document currently in force, and it is the same for both countries, the 1990 agreement, as mentioned by @danBLOO and @reosarevok. You can read it on page 29 of the PDF you provided. It does not support title case.
This is a silly challenge when @wtfislibrious did precisely this on the 4th reply to this thread
In my experience Portuguese title capitalization is all over the place, you easily find hundreds of releases with either style, so there’s really no point talking about the number of examples, we could be here forever sharing examples.
The point for me is, since sentence case is correct, supported by the orthographic rules in force, the standard in MB for years, and simple for most people to follow, what would be the benefit of changing it?
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Hey @blackteadarkmatter, so, that PDF, right? It’s got a lot of history showing how we’ve always been writing titles. It doesn’t really say anything about them not being “valid”. Not sure where you’re getting your ideas from.
Just to put it out there, I’m from Brazil and I know the way we do our titles. That’s how we roll in schools, buddy. I don’t know where you’re coming from, but it feels like we might not be on the same page about making things better here. I’m pretty sure any Brazilian/Portuguese person would have the same issues with the MB titles…
It’d be super cool to get Portuguese titles properly handled as per the way we work in Portuguese. So, how about we make the same rules for English titles too? Let’s do titles like a sentence - doesn’t that sound fair? Can you see any benefit to doing it differently?
Why only English have it’s correct title style, and ALL other has to convey to a common guideline no matter how this language do titles?
I am not wanting to change how English make titles here, please, I am just doing a counter-argument so you can understand my point.
Best.
That PDF is a book by the Brazilian Federal Senate, entitled Acordo ortográfico da língua portuguesa : atos internacionais e normas correlatas. It includes the current orthographic agreement (pages 10-41), historical international agreements from Portugal and Brazil (pages 44-67) and the text of the laws ratifying the agreement (94-96, Brazil only). These are legal documents, and valid here means that the law was ratified, making the orthographic agreement national law. Non-valid would mean never ratified (like the 1945 agreement in Brazil), or superseded by more recent legislation (like the 1945 agreement in Portugal). That’s where I get my idea about what’s valid. You say that
The current applicable Acordo Ortográfico da Lingua Portuguesa para o Brasil aligns perfectly with the rule I’ve mentioned, see PAGE 88, Article 44.
But the page 88, Article 44 isn’t in the current orthographic agreement, it’s in the 1945 one, as you would know if you actually read the book instead of searching the PDF for what you want to find.
You keep saying sentence case isn’t used in Brazil, even challenge ANYONE to find one example, but whenever people show you that it is, in physical and digital releases, you dismiss it, in a good example of the No true Scotsman fallacy.
If think it’s clear many kinds of capitalization have been used for Portuguese titles, historically and currently, and the current norm (1990) seems to prefer sentence case, so the question would be, what would be the benefit of changing the guideline?
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blacktea, please…
The official documents provided here support the historical norms regarding title conventions in Brazil. There is no evidence to suggest that the naming of titles, as proposed in MusicBrainz for Portuguese, has been referenced. Furthermore, there isn’t any citation indicating that the traditional method employed by Brazilians to title works is no longer valid. Kindly refrain from making such claims unless you can pinpoint precisely where it indicates that my suggestion is invalid and that the guidelines of MusicBrainz align with the official documentation.
The advantage(or benefit as you mention) of my proposal would be enabling MusicBrainz to utilize the correct conventions for titles as they are traditionally formulated in Portuguese.
Best regards
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