@Maria Within a style, would you need the ability to have multiple different types of separators for different types of names, or is one separator (one of “nothing”, “whitespace”, or “・”) used consistently for all names?
Thanks for taking care. Yesterday, I got the message. Now I will try to solve the first problems in direct contact and later report about the results.
This is a really friendly and helpful circle!
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Two answers:
- The most urgent point:
Being able to separate family and given name with one separator " (one of “nothing”, “whitespace”, or “・”) " is the most important and urgent need. It would create sensible bibliographies.
- The perfect solution:
Separators may change from writing systems to writing system; this is mostly corresponding to the language of the entry itself (e.g. if the language is “ja”, the main fields are set to “ja”) and to the language and script of the variants. In Japanese, separating “katakana” (the syllable writing for foreign names) needs another separator than the “kanji” (the Chinese characters used for Japanese names). And, whitespace is not whitespace, there are at least two sorts.
(After reading my post, it seems that the next paragraphs are more concerned with JurisM, you may want to ignore them).
Some earlier experience that may help to find a conclusion:
In LaTEX, I used to separate the scripts with the range of the unicode adresses, so it was possible to separate the katakana from the Kanji, and of course Hangeul etc… But as far as Kanji are concerned, they share the same unicode adress regardless of traditional or modern Chinese, Korean or Japanese. Although these Chinese characters are written differently in each language, they cannot be differentiated just by their code. So for deciding which kind of Chinese character to use one might have to have a look at the language of the field (set by the field attribute from the language tab in the JurisM preferences or the language for the whole entry) as well.
That was a short and a long answer, I hope it is OK.
So, within a writing system, only one type of separator is used?
Yes and no.
Short answer: One separator per writing system is acceptable; and whitespace must not be collapsed.
Comment 1: How do we define “writing system”? A script, a font, a language, Unicode adresses?
Comment 2:
As soon as it is possible to deal with names in Far Eastern scripts (CJK) exactly like in Western scripts – i.e. as soon as the unwanted service of collapsing names written in Eastern scripts is gone – one could deal with the situation in the CSL style.
Some background information (and really thanks for your patience):
Of the East Asian languages, Chinese (Modern and Traditional) has basically one writing system, but Japanese and Korean are mixed.
Korean is written mostly in Hangeul, but there are cases where Chinese characters are involved, especially in personal names. As far as I have learned, though, both writing systems use the same separator in Korean nowadays, which is a one spaced whitespace.
In Japanese, we have three writing systems that are combined in text and bibliographies. These writing systems are the syllable alphabeths hiragana and katakana and the Chinese characters.
Japanese names are mostly written in Chinese characters, given name and family name was traditionally not regularly separated, separation depends on the number of characters as well (4 characters often are not separated, 3 are, and so on). Nowadays, particularly in bibliographies, names are usually separated with whitespace. Here, we have either the 1space or the double space whitespace. But this can be set in the CSL style, as long as the whitespace separator will not be collapsed.
The pronunciation of Japanese names is not fixed, it has to be clarified by additionally writing the name in syllables, in hiragana or katakana. When this is done, the separator is never a “nakaten”, but whitespace, if at all. – This information about Japanese names written in syllables does not interfer with the CSL development because the Japanese names are cited in Chinese characters anyway. Still, we need the information about the syllables, because sorting follows the reading as expressed in the syllable alphabet in many journals – which is a task for JurisM. And in the case of sorting, the separator does not matter because it is never shown. – So this information about the writing of Japanese names in syllables was just to answer your question properly, i.e. that the languages do use several separators.
The second separator – and this is an information that is related with your question – is needed for foreign names that are transliterated into katakana, and family and given names are exclusively separated by the nakaten.
So, I understand that it may be difficult to separate the Japanese names written in Chinese characters and the Western names written in Katakana when dealing with a Japanese source. Both are written in CJK script, both are written in Japanese language, but they adress different Unicode regions.
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Perhaps a way to step further to solving the problem:
On the Zotero forums https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/354267 a nice guy helped me with a related problem, and so I exported some text with BetterBibtex. (The problem itself is no longer relevant, since we have JurisM).
Checking the bib file I realised that it contained a lot of what I am looking for:
- East Asian names are separated like Western names.
- Variants of a field are recognized. At least some variants of the title field.
Here are the important parts of the bib file, which all contain variants in JurisM, but at least the titles are adressed:
. . .
title = {中性子放射化分析による胎土分析の方法と意義},
booktitle = {広田遺跡の研究 ー 人の形質・技術・移動},
author = {篠藤, マリア and シュテルバ, ヨハネス},
editor = {木下, 尚子},
publisher = {{熊本大学}},
location = {{熊本}},
langid = {japanese},
titleaddon = {Chūseishi hōshaka bunseki no hōho to igi},
usere = {Method and significance of Neutron Activation Analysis in ceramic analyses}
. . .
I asked on the forum whether there is a way to find out how BBT gets to these informations. Maybe, there is a similar way to get to the other informations as well.
Here, for reference, I include a screenshot of the entry in JurisM, so you can see to which fields I added variants.
As always, thanks a lot!