[mb-users] Artist sort names for non latin scripts

[Bogdan Butnaru]

On 9/11/07, Philip Jägenstedt <philip at foolip.org> wrote:
> So, what to do about this? To be honest, I've never understood what
> sort names are good for, so I might be missing something important.
> It's said that it's how things would be sorted in a record store, but
> I seriously doubt any record store would consider sorting music of
> foreign script under the latin alphabet.

I don't mean to intrude in your problem too much---I'm not very
knowledgeable in the field---but there's a quick answer to at least
one question: The sort names are good for and were primarily created
to solve a single problem: allow sane sorting of (Latin-script-named)
artists' names.

This means (relatively) trivial stuff like sorting "The Cranberies" at
"C" and "Michael Jackson" at "J".

The transliteration part was overloaded in the system the first time
someone noticed the guidelines don't work in Kanji (and pretty much
everything else that's not Latin, for that matter). So someone thought
that it would be useful to put a transliteration there, which is not a
bad idea, it's just harder to do sometimes, for exactly the reasons
you cited---there's more than one way to do it.

(BTW, I wasn't here when those guidelines were made, I'm just guessing.)

-- Bogdan Butnaru — bogdanb at gmail.com
"I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O.