Philip Jägenstedt wrote: > On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 10:12 AM, Nikki <[email protected]> wrote: > In the record stores in Beijing I've been I haven't been able to > discern any particular order at all, things have instead been grouped > by popularity, genre, record label and things like that. In HMV > Singapore I remember that artists were sorted by their Hanyu Pinyin > name, but still with Chinese artists separate from the non-Chinese. I > don't remember what HMV in Hong Kong was like, but I was able to find > things to buy! > > More generally, sorting in Chinese seems to be either by radical and > stroke count (a traditional Chinese dictionary from Taiwan that I > have) or by Hanyu Pinyin (my mainland simplified Chinese dictionary). > However, both of these systems are only for sorting individual > characters, sorting whole names using either system would still give > the wrong result for characters that have the same romanization or > same radical and stroke count.
Ah, interesting (and complicated!). What about on label sites? Japanese labels at least tend to have a sorted list of artists. > How about Japanese, are the sort names we have for those artists useful? They're awful if you want to sort things the way they would be sorted in Japanese (because hiragana/katakana order is completely different from latin order). They're not too bad if you do actually want to sort by the romanised name (the romanisation systems are all pretty similar, unlike Chinese). As for how things are sorted in Japanese, http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Japanese_Artists is really old but explains it pretty well and has plenty of examples. I don't know what happens when two names with different kanji have the same pronunciation though, I never thought about that. Nikki _______________________________________________ MusicBrainz-style mailing list [email protected] http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style
