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-   -   Punctuation/typography question - nakaguro (https://www.japanforum.com/forum/japanese-language-help/27613-punctuation-typography-question-nakaguro.html)

Odin 09-08-2009 09:04 AM

Punctuation/typography question - nakaguro
 
I am tagging and organizing my music collection. I am rather obsessive compulsive about filling in every little tidbit of information within the data fields. I have a method for handling artist from countries who do not use Latin scripts. First, I enter the artist's name in his or her native language and script. Then next to that, I well place it's romanized form. This method serves me quite well. However, I have a couple of questions about how to handle situations were more than one artist or composer is involved.

1) When two or more, artists, writers, composers, are involved is it more accepted to list them as:
初音ミクと巡音ルカ

or as

初音ミク・巡音ルカ (with the nakaguro ... aka interpunct)

In my head, it should be the former instead of the later. However this may just be my western way of thinking. Typically in English, two items do not make a list and you would not use punctuation to separate them.

2) When listing multiple persons whom are of equal importance, is there a preferred order to list them? In English you would typically list them according to alphabetical order of their surnames.
Applying the same sort of methodology to Japanese I would think the normal order would be:

初音ミク・巡音ルカ instead of 巡音ルカ・初音ミク because it is my understanding that the "ha" phoneme should come before the "ma" phonem. Then again I maybe thinking too western again.

Now I realize this a trivial thing, in the grand scheme of things. But for some reason not knowing this is driving me a bit insane. I've searched for the answer on the web in vain. Hopefully someone here has spent enough time in a Japanese library to give me a little insight.

Nagoyankee 09-08-2009 02:22 PM

1) You must forget about using と. Native speakers won't ever use it in a list of names.

You have the following choices:

AAA / BBB
AAA ・ BBB
AAA & BBB

2) The Japanese counterpart of your "alphabetical order" is 五十音順. The baby talk for that is あいうえお順. That's the order in which words are listed in a Japanese dictionary.

初音ミク comes before 巡音ルカ, as you said.

Odin 09-08-2009 03:56 PM

Thanks Nagoyankee! You can't imagine how much this been bugging me. Any information I could glimmer from style guides, quite literately got lost in translation. That, and I could find almost zero consistency with it's use on the web.


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