Question about song titles for Japanese geeks :D

[J0nB0yH88]

Hey fellow ayu fans!

Right, so I'm doing a paper on languages, and I have chosen to base mine on various song titles, so for my Japanese section I'm covering my favourite ayu!

I just have a couple of questions, I've noticed she uses various different symbols for subtitles, for example looking at her album GUILTY we have:

'(don't) Leave me alone' using brackets or parenthesis as part of the actual song title

'Marionette -prelude-' using either hyphens or dashes as extra info about the song that isn't really part of the title

and

'untitled ~for her~' using wave dash (yes I don't have them on my keyboard lol) to mark off subtitles

Just wondering if anyone can confirm the uses of these symbols, and if anyone can tell me the proper symbol used for '-prelude-', I've seen it many times in titles such as 'A Best -Black-', are these hyphens? dashes? en/em dashes? ...I tried copying and pasting the symbols from the internet but so far everyone uses keyboard cheat 'hyphen-minus' which isn't really grammar.

If anyone could give any info it'd be much appreciated

thanks

[reixminako]

I'm pretty sure that since Japanese doesn't have any punctuation (besides period and sometimes comma) they use punctuation among English words pretty freely; they don't necessarily have to mean anything.

But in the case of (don't) Leave me alone the meaning of the parentheses in the lyrics -- she wants you to leave her alone, but don't leave her alone. Otherwise things like dashes and wave things (whatever they're called) are pretty much just used to separate words.

[Corybobory]

^Japanese uses lots of punctuation - they use parentheses as well as square brackets (for quotes), question marks, exclamation marks, that little dot to denote separations between words (like with foreign names but I've seen it between kanji as well)... colons... they have the full range!

For the song titles though I can't really help... but I might point out to be careful not to get language, and the way language is represented by writing (orthography) mixed up!