2011/6/8 Yin Izanami <yind...@gmail.com>: > The artist "AAA" is literally and physically sorted as "TORIPURU-EE" / > "Triple A" in Japan. You can see this in Japanese bookstores and on > avexnet's listing of all its artists - it is sorted under the "TO" > character, not "A" or "E" or the like. > > I realize artist sort name is not supposed to be used for pronunciation, and > "AAA" is also already in Latin script. However, this would not be the first > time that the artist name and sort name don't actually say the same thing - > for example, > 蔡宜翎 (Tsai Yi Ling) is sorted as "Tsai, Jolin" > 周杰倫 (Chou Jie Lin) is sorted as simply "Chou, Jay", with no indication of > the 3rd character. > > If you agree / disagree with this "sortname doesn't match Latin-for-Latin to > the artist name", then I'd like to hear what others think about it.
http://musicbrainz.org/edit/14592861 is the edit to vote on, everyone. Quoting from http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Sortname_Style "All artist sort names should be in Latin script. If the artist's name is normally written using a non-Latin script, use the Latin script translated or transliterated name by which the artist is most commonly known." This is why many Chinese artists have sortnames that aren't transcriptions. Both Jolin Tsai and Jay Chou are the names used by the artists themselves in some contexts. IMO, the sortname is useless for non-Latin scripts, or at least for Chinese. In order to get anything like a sane sorting you'd have to use the same transliteration system (say Hanyu Pinyin) for all artists, but that makes no sense for Hong Kong artists whose native names are in Cantonese, not Mandarin. Even if you did consistently apply Hanyu Pinyin, you'd still get the surnames 张 and 章 mixed together. I assume that the sortname is equally useless for sorting Japanese artists (who must also have same-sounding but different surnames), so it's not really worthwhile trying to get canonical Japanese sorting using MusicBrainz. -- Philip Jägenstedt _______________________________________________ MusicBrainz-style mailing list MusicBrainz-style@lists.musicbrainz.org http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
