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WP:VG/GL#Non-English games

WP:VG/GL mediation

This discussion is now at Misplaced Pages talk:Requests for mediation/Video games developed in Japan#Should the romaji version of Japanese videogame names be included in Misplaced Pages articles?

Swung dash vs "fullwidth tilde"

I reverted the addition of "fullwidth tildes" after "swung dashes", because after all we are listing examples, and two is enough. Furthermore, the whole "fullwidth tilde" idea is wonky: there is indeed a separate Unicode character with this name, but it is accomodating some quirk of the JIS character set, hence the "fullwidth" (which is a purely Japanese notion). In my browser at least the character shown as a "swung dash" is *identical* to that shown as a "fullwidth tilde", so it promotes confusion -- I had to look in a text editor, which happens to use a different font, in which the two wavy lines are very very slightly different. So I am sure you are right that when a wavy line appears in a Japanese title, sometimes it will be the result of entering the Unicode value for "swung dash" and other times for "fullwidth tilde", but it will not in general be possible to tell which, unless you are an expert on the particular font. Note also that normally in English the word "tilde" refers to the diacritic over certain letters in Portuguese etc. ... Although I said "two is enough" above, I think I will add an "etc" note, since nothing here is exhaustive. Imaginatorium (talk) 07:53, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

The guideline never states "fullwidth tildes". It simply says "tilde", which reflects practice in Japanese media. And no, the swung dash and the tilde are not the same character. The wave dash 〜 in my UI at least goes down then up while the tildes ～ and ~ go up then down. And the use of 〜 exists only at the Japanese Misplaced Pages as far as I can ever tell. Every other reliable source I come across uses either form of the tilde, which in the case of musical compositions includes the record labels and the bands. I've never seen 〜 outside of Misplaced Pages. And stop changing the guideline after you've been reverted for fucks sake. Does no one fucking know about WP:BRD but me?—Ryūlóng (琉竜) 07:59, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

For what it's worth, 〜, ～ and ~ all look similar to me: up -> down -> up. Erigu (talk) 12:05, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

This is what I got.—Ryūlóng (琉竜) 12:24, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

That's a surprising image, Ryulong (and your first twiddle looks a bit pixellated, too). I don't recall seeing a down-up nami-dash; the thumbnail on the right and the following image are both up-down: http://dist.joshinweb.jp/cdshop/img/jacket/org/rzcd/rzcd-45254.jpg

The evidence seems to be strongly against the claim that "tilde" and "swung dash" (or "wave dash" etc) are totally distinct characters. I think the problem is actually even worse than I originally thought: there appears to be an unending supply of Unicode values representing different flavours of these things -- here's a useful list of just some: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/dashes.html

As Korpela says, originally "tilde" meant the diacritic in Spanish etc; I guess it was used as the name for the ASCII character (because "twiddles", its real name, didn't sound posh enough), and in days long gone, ASCII ~ still generally sat near the top of the character position, making it look awkard when used to mean "approximately equals". But anyway, the point is not really about Unicode values, it's about marks appearing on CD covers and in images, and what to call them. I think "swung dash" is the most normal English term for this -- e.g. p. 12a of my Collegiate Webster: "A boldface swung dash ～ is used to stand for the main entry...". I do not think it helps to show more than one of these symbols, because inevitably some different Unicode variants will be indistinguishable to many viewers, but I do think it helps to include an "etc" clause. That is why I edited as I did. But of course it could say "swung dash (aka tilde, wave dash etc)" or whatever if anyone feels strongly about it.

Imaginatorium (talk) 16:52, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

All of this discussion about what is and is not a tilde is really pointless. All I know is that when I copy song or album titles from the Oricon, Billboard Japan, Mora, Barks, Natalie, etc. they use ～ and not 〜.—Ryūlóng (琉竜) 18:59, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

Here is a copy of how your message above appears in my browser. Do you not see any problem with this?

I can't quite understand what you are claiming: you seem to have a system which makes "wave dash" appear as "down-up", but this does not agree with the images I have pointed to above. Do you accept this? Can you tell me how I would understand your comment by looking at this image of it?? If you tell me something about how things appear on your screen I believe you -- can you not do the same for me? FWIW, here's an article (in Japanese) about confusing "nami-dasshu" with "tilde", pointing out the important difference in languages (not English!) which use vertical writing that dashes should be rotated 90 degrees; this of course is how the wavy ornamentation is used in vertical Japanese. But I'm not really that bothered about the name, as much as the puzzlement from having two copies of essentially the same symbol, at least as viewed on computers other than yours. Imaginatorium (talk) 04:24, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Ha! A lot of this is explained by this bit: Tilde#Unicode_and_Shift_JIS_encoding_of_wave_dash (it's a Windows problem) Imaginatorium (talk) 04:39, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Okay, but even then I don't see the wavedash in use on my end on any websites.—Ryūlóng (琉竜) 07:29, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

From what I understand (it is a bit of a mess and I'm not too familiar with all this Unicode business), Japanese people only use the tilde instead of the wave dash because of that inverted wave dash error (apparently caused by someone who wasn't familiar with the Japanese language and went "here's the vertical form of the character, so we just have to rotate this thing 90°, easy peasy..."). It's a quick fix, a band aid. Ideally, the correct wave dash (up -> down -> up, like the tilde) would be used. And it seems the inverted wave dash was actually corrected from Windows Vista on? What's your OS, Ryulong, if you don't mind telling us? Japanese Windows? Older than Vista? Erigu (talk) 07:54, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Vista, but when I first got the computer I copied over all of my fonts from XP so Meiryo isn't the preferred Japanese font for some reason.—Ryūlóng (琉竜) 11:53, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Or Firefox went with MS PGothic for my settings and now the two characters look identical.—Ryūlóng (琉竜) 12:02, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Anyway, I think we now understand the problem. Unicode screwed up, and what was meant to be a normal swung dash (波ダッシュ in Japanese) got turned upside down, sometimes. We see different things, which is why communication was a bit difficult. The answer seems to be not to use the U:WAVE_DASH code, but the U:FULLWIDTH_TILDE code. However, this does not mean it should necessarily be described as a tilde -- as the article I forgot to link above says ( http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~wq6k-yn/code/wavedash.html ) this is a sort of dash, because it is rotated for vertical writing. There ought to be a note about this (coding problem) in the MOS too -- I will look at it when I have a bit more time. Imaginatorium (talk) 18:17, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

That doesn't really explain why I experience the full width tilde character universally off of Misplaced Pages, even if it is meant to be the wave dash or why we can't explain that character exists in use.—Ryūlóng (琉竜) 19:28, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

I think that if you read the cited references carefully, it explains _exactly_ why you see what you see. Look, in real life those wavy dashes on CD jackets etc are called 波ダッシュ (nami-dasshu / lit. "wave-dash"). (But if you ask the average Japanese speaker what that symbol is called they almost certainly won't know, or will say something like から？ (kara / 'from') because entering 'kara' in an IME will usually get you the wavy dash.) In the JIS character set this character is there as a "full-width" (i.e. zenkaku) wavy dash, and somewhere someone decided that the Japanese-English expression for this was WAVE DASH (since 波ダッシュ isn't in J-E dictionaries, but the separate words are). The Unicode people screwed importing this, and got the picture of the symbol upside down in at least some version of their standard; and they called this U:WAVE DASH. There are therefore two ways of handling this Unicode character: use a font which displays the (obviously wrong) upside down version (following the spec), or display what is obviously the intended version in JIS. It seems that versions of Windows up to XP do the former -- and this is why you see U:WAVE DASH displayed as an upside down nami-dasshu, which of course you do not see on CD jackets etc. (at least, until you see one, of course!) While there is this problem with U:WAVE DASH, one workaround is to use U:FULLWIDTH_TILDE, which is (more or less) identical in form to the correct version, and should appear correctly on just about anyone's computer. (This is the Microsoft version, as mentioned in the asahi.net page cited above, which explains why this workaround isn't really the right way to do it, because of vertical writing, which we do not have to worry about, because the en:WP styleguide explicitly says we use English typographical conventions.) So I will remove the U:WAVE_DASH version of the character. Imaginatorium (talk) 17:38, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Not to mention I still really want to get rid of that part of the MOS because it really gets in the way of what shouldn't be a problematic title if we just converted the character to a tilde.—Ryūlóng (琉竜) 19:31, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm afraid this suggests that you have entirely missed the point the MOS is making. Japanese uses decorative marks (not just dashes, also square brackets etc) to mark off headings, subtitles and so on. (It's easy to see why: in the days of mechanical typesetting, with a small character set like the Roman alphabet, it's easy to have variant fonts like bold, italic faces etc, but with a large character set this luxury is impracticable.) The section on subtitles says that we indicate subtitles with English typographical conventions, not Japanese ones. This is not restricted to wavy dashes in particular, but includes any such decorative marks. I feel that I am making the same points I started with, but I learned about something on the way. I think we should also draw attention to the U:WAVE_DASH problem in the MOS, and probably replace any other occurrences with U:FULLWIDTH_TILDE. Because as already observed, these marks really are a kind of dash (they rotate for vertical writing: you have surely seen this?) I still think they are optimally referred to by their English name, which is "swung dash", but I agree it may be a good idea to add 'aka'. Imaginatorium (talk) 17:50, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

It's not a decorative mark if it is used universally through the Japanese media to demarcate the subtitle and they are used in conjunction with English punctuation. There is no reason that a song whose title is written in Japan as "W-B-X～W-Boiled Extreme～" should have its article located at W-B-X (W-Boiled Extreme).—Ryūlóng (琉竜) 18:40, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes there is -- it's exactly the point the MOS is making. We write English WP in English, using English typographical conventions: we do not use blackletter type to write 'Mein Kampf', and we do not use French guillemets for quoting French titles. In the same way, we do not use dashes (of any sort) as paired bracketing devices, as they are used in Japanese, because in English dashes are separators. (I don't really understand what you mean by "in conjunction with English punctuation"; English punctuation is not normally used in Japanese.) Imaginatorium (talk) 16:17, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

It makes no sense. Why would a title like "W-B-X ～W-Boiled Extreme～", "Regret nothing ～Tighten Up～", or "～interlude～「Detox」" have to be changed to such an extent? Why do we have to waste a sentence describing the original form as a "stylization" when those characters can be substituted for their closest approximation on the QWERTY keyboard? How do you deal with a song titled "REAL LOVE ～魂に火をつけて～ feat. 飛蘭" or "牙狼～僕が愛を伝えてゆく～ (インストゥルメンタル)"? Or instances where a song only has a single such character in its title rather than a pair like with "Round ZERO～BLADE BRAVE"? This decision to completely forbid this usage causes so many more problems than it should.—Ryūlóng (琉竜) 18:52, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

No standards, only deliberate differentiation

I removed the following subsection because it is utter nonsense only supported by the original proposer Ryulong (talk · contribs).

===Other languages that use the Japanese writing systems=== Several other languages, such as ] and ], use one or more of the Japanese writing systems (usually ]) to transcribe the language. When writing about subjects in these languages, use the accepted standard transliteration for the language if one exists. If no standard transliteration method exists, use a direct kana to rōmaji transcription (use the standard modified Hepburn romanization scheme except when it comes to {{nihongo3||オウ|ou}}, {{nihongo3||オオ|oo}}, and {{nihongo3||ウウ|uu}}, rather than {{nihongo3||オウ|ō}}, {{nihongo3||オオ|ō}}, and {{nihongo3||ウウ|ū}}) and doubling vowels extended by {{nihongo2|ー}} instead of using a macron over the vowel. ;Examples *{{lang|ain|アィヌ・モシ<small>リ</small>}} is the name for the island of ] in Ainu. As described at ], a standard transliteration method exists, showing that the transliterated name should be ''Aynu Mosir'' and not ''Ainu Moshiri''. *{{lang|ryu|ウチナー}} is the name for ] in the Ryukyuan languages. No standard transliteration method exists for the Ryukyuan languages, so the name would be parsed as ''Uchinaa'' and not ''Uchinā''.

One might ask two questions. Why doesn't this make sense? And why has such a nonsense survived for a long time?

The answer to the first question is twofold:

• The Ainu language has two separate (not mixed) writing systems: Katakana and the Latin alphabet. We should not transliterate Katakana into another romanization system. Perhaps, the sole exception would be an article that explains the Katakana writing system itself. This subsection was written by the guy who was incapable of understanding what transliteration was even though he was given a short lecture about it.
• The second part reads: "Even though I admit there are no standards, I want to deliberately differentiate the Ryukyuan languages from Standard Japanese by enforcing a strange exception regarding long vowels." The amateurish-sounding direct kana to rōmaji transcription does not make sense. The original proposer does not justify the exception. So its sole purpose must be his personal desire. "Why the fuck should we use a Japanese romanization system to romanize it?"

The answer to the second question is, again, twofold:

• This subsection has simply been ignored because the topics concerned rarely receive attention.
• This section has been owned by one guy. No sound logic. No proper process of consensus building. He just edits Misplaced Pages far more often than anyone else here (see also the revision history). Because this subsection sounds silly to anyone who has taken Linguistics 101, it has encountered clear opposition at least once. Take a look at the archive (2). You would be surprised at how unproductive the discussion was. Anyone possessing a minimum knowledge of linguistics would agree with Jpatokal. He has already pointed out why this subsection does not make sense. Also, he kindly explained what transliteration was. However, Ryulong repeated the same thing like a parrot and the nonsense remains the same today. Unfortunately this has proven to be an effective strategy here in Misplaced Pages. Although I am reluctant to repeat the old unconstructive discussion, I believe that for the future of English Misplaced Pages, we need to change the situation.

--Nanshu (talk) 14:04, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

No standards outside Misplaced Pages, no standards in Misplaced Pages

Because the current subsection is utter nonsense that failed to gain consensus, it would be more productive to restart from scratch. To keep the discussion constructive, I would like to require participants to know what transliteration is. I'm sorry if you feel insulted. This sounds obvious as we are talking about romanization! But unfortunately, this is not the case here.

For the Ainu language, the solution is trivial. Just follow the Latin orthography and put Katakana separately. Do not transliterate Katakana. Because this is obvious to anyone who know what transliteration is, I see no need in mentioning it in MoS.

For the Ryukyuan languages (plural), my proposal is to leave things unstandardized. We need to get back to basics. If there are no standards outside Misplaced Pages, why should we force a standardization through MoS? It's getting more like original research.

In the following, I give a brief sketch of the linguistic situation outside Misplaced Pages because I think the past discussion was out of touch with the reality. We should base our decision on facts, not on someone's personal desire.

The most important fact to keep in mind is that Ryukyuan is an umbrella term (confusingly, it also refers to a language spoken in Shuri). Each traditional community or shima has its own spoken language. There are literally hundreds of languages. They would be clustered into 5, 6 or more groups with the inherently vague criterion of mutual intelligibility. But this does not mean there are 5 or 6 standard languages. There are no serious attempts of standardization, not to mention the creation of written languages. There is no lingua franca other than Standard Japanese. Speakers of these languages use Written Japanese in writing.

With that said, I find it convenient to separate articles into linguistic and non-linguistic topics.

And as far as I know, linguistic descriptions (e.g., phonology and example sentences) are out of scope of MoS. Anyway, it is technically impossible to specify a standard way of transcription that can be applied to all languages concerned. External sources use their own ways of transcription with varying degrees of accuracy. The choice of transcription greatly depends on purposes: phonology or morphology/syntax, descriptive or comparative, or synchronic or diachronic. Fully descriptive approaches have been taken only recently (e.g., Shimoji Michinori's 2008 work on the Irabu language). There are some locally compiled dictionaries but they often present inaccurate and/or inconsistent data. Considerable difficulty would be experienced in integrating different sources. Also, for the reasons I explained above, reporting the informant's home community is a must.

For non-linguistic topics, most sources are written (1) by non-linguists and (2) in Written Japanese. English sources are scarce and some of them (e.g., George H. Kerr's "Okinawa: the History of an Island People" (1958)) are seriously outdated. In most cases, we end up consulting Kazari Eikichi (Amami Ōshima), Inamura Kenpu (Miyako) and Kishaba Eijun (Yaeyama), just to name a few.

This leads to two things. One is that data provided are linguistically inaccurate. The writer may not have fully understand of the phonology of the language he spoke, and he had considerable difficulty choosing a proper sequence of Kana characters. The other is that the distinction between Standard Japanese and the writer's own language often blurs. What we read is Written Japanese borrowing some terms from local languages. The correspondence between the two is often regular and transparent.

If a word or phrase is written in the logograph Kanji, it means that its pronunciation is left to readers. In that case, we would choose a "standardized" form for Misplaced Pages. The Futori family would write its name as 太 while it is pronounced something like "huθori" in Yamatohama, Amami Ōshima. In fact, such a conversion is done throughout Japan. "ɸɯɡɯsɯma" (this may not so accurate) is what we know as Fukushima (福島).

When Katakana is chosen, it is a sign of attempting to transcribe a local language. Here I use カムィヤキ (Kamuiyaki) for a case study. Kamuiyaki was named after a pond in Isen Town, Tokunoshima of the Amami Islands. It is interesting to note that we cannot technically apply the (modified) Hepburn to カムィヤキ. The sequence "ui" represents not a diphthong but a central vowel. I think the name may be better transcribed as Kamïyaki. However, since this is about archaeology, no one in the field dare to choose such a complicated form. As far as I know, all archaeological reports transcribe カムィヤキ as Kamuiyaki. For your information, Okinawa-based archaeologist Asato Susumu refused to accept the name of カムィヤキ and used 亀焼 instead although no one follows him. If we adopted his proposal, the article title would have been Kameyaki.

If you want to cover a broad region, it complicates things even further. Ryukyu in a broad sense is an aggregate of numerous, traditionally isolated communities. It is by no means a monolithic entity. What you have to do is a comparative study. 童名 (lit. childhood name) is a good example. In my opinion, it deserves comparative studies because it is the only name component shared across various subregions. The problem is the linguistic diversity. The term in question reads "warabena" in Standard Japanese, "warabïnaː" in the language of Yamatohama, Amami Ōshima, "warabinaː" in the language of Shuri, Okinawa Island, and "yarabinaː" in both the languages of Shika, Ishigaki Island (Yaeyama) and Hirara, Miyako Island (this is a rare coincidence). Given the fact that no local language has a status of lingua franca, I think Standard Japanese is a reasonable choice.

Incorporating historical documents would be a nightmare. Again, Kanji leaves its pronunciation to readers. The problem is that Okinawa has some documents and inscriptions written predominantly in Hiragana. The language used in these resources are considerably different from the modern languages. It is partly because the set of sound changes that characterize the modern Okinawan languages happened relatively recently. But it is presumably different from the language spoken at that time too. No one attempted to faithfully transcribe a spoken language. After all, the written language was in Japanese literary tradition. Take おもろさうし for example. I am not sure if vowel raising (o > u) completed at the time of the compilation of the book, but おもろ (omoro) certainly corresponds to modern "umuru." さうし (saushi) is a obsolete spelling of そうし. And we name its article Omoro Sōshi.

To sum up, we need to realize the complicated situation before we try to create some kind of standardization. I think inconsistencies are inevitable but better than an unreasonable standardization. --Nanshu (talk) 14:04, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

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