Choral Public Domain Library

Modern Anglophone orthography presents problems, perhaps the most extreme being the apocryphal rendition of "fish" as "ghoti" (gh as in enough, o as in women, ti as in nation).

There is a pervasive problem on CPDL with the consistent spelling of older pieces; not so much in Latin which essentially has been dead and ossified (subject to minor tweaks in church Latin) for half a millennium, but particularly in French, and less so in Italian, English, German, Dutch, and less frequently posted languages.
The current convention appears to be that pieces are posted up under the spelling found in the original publication.

This inevitably tends to Babel. I have just posted two chansons, which afforded me the opportunities of using as title spellings Jouissance (joissance, joyssance, jouyssance, Ioissance, Ioyssance,Iouyssance) vous Donnerai (donneray) and Au Joli (ioli, joly, ioly) bois (boys); a total of 22 possible permutations. The convention leads to a proliferation of pieces with a common text, but with nonce titles; it also leads to frustration, both as a sense and as a consequence, in those casual searchers not fully conversant with the vagaries of obsolete spelling.

IMO pieces should be posted under a moniker reflecting the modern orthography of the appropriate language, the current usage being used as the lingua franca (see what I did there?). Some interface would need to be considered to co-ordinate this standard nomenclature with the myriad of spellings evinced in the contents lists on individual publication pages; perhaps by means of aliases for titles.

I feel that if a transcriber is not sufficiently knowledgeable to provide a correct modern title (many singers might extend this to the entire underlay), then arguably they should not be offering "editions" in that language.

If help is needed, then I am entirely happy to help with the extirpation of "ung" (for un) everywhere.

Chug a lug.

Dear Chris,
please note that most CPDL members speak English only as their second language. Using the full spectrum of your vocabulary does not help being understood. Especially when looking up words like "nonce" in a dictionary leaves the reader even more perplexed what on earth this might have to do with CPDL

Concerning the title, I wonder whether this actually is an issue. Before adding a piece to CPDL, every contributor will first look for a work page, and should easily find it on the composer page. This way, when looking for "Regina coeli" and finding "Regina caeli", the editor will post it on the already existing work page. Do you have examples of pages that should be merged?

Concerning the orthography in editions, I prefer urtext editions which keep the original orthography and text underlay (as far as it is clear). This might seem to be only a matter of taste, but I think it makes the singers more aware and reminds them that in many cases pronunciation was different back then. And in my experience, singing from editions with "auntient orthography" was always more fun for the singers.