Talk:¡Ay Carmela!

The titles of ¡Ay Carmela! (song), ¡Ay Carmela! (film), and ¡Ay Carmela! (play)

We've got three related items with identical titles (and I'm posting this on the talk pages of all three). The way they were when I started, placing them in chronological order, is:

Ay Carmela [the song, the oldest]
Ay Carmela (play) [guess what, the play, which I haven't seen]
¡Ay Carmela! [the movie, in which the song is sung several times]

The first thing I did was move

Ay Carmela (play)

to

¡Ay Carmela! (play)

but I realized that isn't going to cover it. Also, the links to the pages seemed that if they weren't pretty confused already, they were going to get more so.

First of all, all three of these should have single exclamation points fore and aft. (Spanish is the only language that uses an upside-down question mark and exclamation point, and does so routinely.) The play and the movie are definite. The movie poster is reproduced with the article on the movie, and the cover of the Cátedra edition of the play has single exclamation points. And that's how they are catalogued in the library of the National Library of Spain (Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid).

There is maybe a little doubt in the case of the Republican (leftist in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939, favoring the elected government which was unable to control or run the country, such that public order was pretty much breaking down)song. It was, for all we know (I don't think anybody has studied it), an oral song before it was written down. I'm taking as a reference the album "Las canciones de la guerra" (The songs of the [civil] war), published by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, where you can hear the song if you want to, it's the first one:

http://centros1.pntic.mec.es/ies.maria.moliner3/guerra/c_rep.htm

I don't know another reference source to turn to. I don't think El País's style guide, or the Orthography publications of the Academia, are helpful for a question like this. Anyway, the album (CD) uses exclamation points for the title of the song.

So all three entries should say ¡Ay Carmela!. But how to tell them apart?

First I thought of doing this:

¡Ay Carmela! [the song] ¡Ay Carmela! (play) ¡Ay Carmela! (film)

which has the virtue of having them in chronological order, and directing the person looking for information on ¡Ay Carmela! to the song, the earliest.

However, on further reflection, this doesn't seem to be so helpful, because almost all users will start out looking for the film, which is, at least now (2015), and in the United States, more popular than the other two put together. So it would be most helpful to direct the reader looking for info on ¡Ay Carmela! to the film.

So I decided to name them this way:

¡Ay Carmela! (song) ¡Ay Carmela! (play) ¡Ay Carmela! [the film, but without anything but the title]

Curiously, these articles are longer in the English Wikipedia than they are in the Spanish. I don't know what that means, if it means anything.deisenbe (talk) 20:25, 27 January 2015 (UTC)