Final punctuation in titles

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Sat, 09/08/2012 - 11:18 — Haruo

The training material says "do not include the punctuation at the end of the first line unless it is a question mark or an exclamation point" but I don't recall seeing such instructions with respect to titles. I've generally been leaving periods and commas off as with first lines, but I'm not sure if that's the rule (or if there is a rule) with titles.


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Sat, 09/08/2012 - 11:36 — Haruo

Some hymnals put the first word (or occasionally two) in the first line in SⓂⒶⓁⓁ CⒶⓅⓈ (I'm using circled caps here to represent small caps because I don't think the very limited HTML codes allowed here—or on the spreadsheets or in the database—permit actual SALL CAPS to be displayed; we'll see if my workaround succeeds). It seems to me that where this is simply a typographical convention adopted by the editors or publishers with no "meaning", just "looks", it makes sense to ignore the small caps and just put those words in normal font; on the other hand, if it were, say, LORD (LⓄⓇⒹ) intended as an englishing of the Tetragrammaton, then I would render it as ALL CAPS; likewise if it appeared to be an emphasis device, as in a hypothetical first line "The Lord said “JEEPERS, Noah!”" I would be inclined to retain the CAPS, shifting SⓂⒶⓁⓁ CⒶⓅⓈ to ALL CAPS if necessary.

Is my judgment up to publishable par?

Sat, 09/08/2012 - 12:23 — Haruo

I'm doing the initial spreadsheet for DakO1911 right now, and generally I'm only entering hymn number, text authority, and first line. Dakota orthography as used in this hymnal includes a few diacritically marked letters; so far I've encountered three of them (ś ḣ ṭ) though I suppose there may be more as yet unnoticed.

One of the very counterintuitive things about authority pages in the Hymnary is that the naming convention (if you leave naming the authority page to the software) treats all non-English letters (and even occasional English ones, like the ë ç in "the Brontë sisters' façade") as if they aren't there. The intuitive thing would be to default to the unaccented letter, if one didn't know the specific normative convention. (Normative conventions being things like "German ä ö ü may be rendered as ae oe ue" or "Esperanto ĉ ĝ ĥ ĵ ŝ may be rendered as ch gh hh jh sh".)

So I've been specifying text authorities' names and substituting s h t for ś ḣ ṭ as they occur. Is this okay?

The same thing can happen with tune names, e.g. the tune most often associated (in American hymnals, anyhow) with the Japanese hymn "Sekai no tomo to", is called TOKYO, but many hymnals give the tune name in full Hepburn romanization, TŌKYŌ. Now, the software would call the authority "www.hymnary.org/tune/tky"; in actuality it's called www.hymnary.org/tune/tokyo_koizumi. The other tune for the text (which I have only seen in Japanese hymnals) is called TOKYO CONVENTION; it never has mācrons. So far I haven't seen any places where the Dakota hymn tune names would require Ś, Ḣ or Ṭ; there are a number of indigenous tunes in the hymnal, and three of them have Dakota tune names, but none of these seems to involve diacritics.

Anyhow, it's fun to be (finally) making some progress in expanding and improving the database. Let me know if I'm doing anything that requires people to come behind me and repaire the damage!

Sat, 09/08/2012 - 13:52 — Haruo

From the 1902 English-Dakota Dictionary I see that there are a number of additional letters I've not yet encountered. One, the eng ( ƞ ), is given as "n" in the hymnal, and I will maintain that approach. The others are:

c̣   (a c with a dot beneath it; I don't have a font with this, so you probably don't either, so I will render it as ç in first lines and as c in authority names)
ġ, which I will render as g in authority names
ḳ, which I will render as k in authority names
p̣, which I will render as p in authority names
ź, which I will render as z in authority names

Fwiw, this is the Williamson orthography. Quite a number of orthographies have been used over the years for Sioux texts—there's a table here in Wikipedia—but since my understanding is that this hymnal is still in use in Dakota-language services, it seems reasonable to focus on its orthography.

Sat, 09/08/2012 - 15:18 — Haruo

I stopped about halfway through. DakO1911 now shows page numbers and hymn numbers up through 57/88, with first lines and text authorities and, where shown, tune names (but not tune authorities).

I should be able to do the other half by the end of the weekend, and at least make a start at linking tunes to authorities.

Mon, 09/10/2012 - 09:08 — dianneshapiro

I guess we haven't run across titles with periods of commas at the end, but if there are any, follow the same rule as the first lines - no punctuation after titles, except for question marks and exclamation points.

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