Signposts on the Vancouver street bear the English name below the official Musqueam name, which is written in the North American Phonetic Alphabet.
I don't see the issue here.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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So... what Seattle does in the International District is this:
Street names are written in both English, and... Mandarin, Japanese, Vietnamese.
Sometimes its two different signs, sometimes its one big sign.
I... don't really see how just putting a sign that writes it out in both languages... is not a reasonable solution to this scenario?
But that doesn't really even appear to be the main issue going on here.
...
As a person who has maintained large databases... yeah, it is... possible to implement support for nonstandard characters... but you would have to very, very directly legally require this specific level of support, and probably have a lot of lead time.
Not saying its morally right or justifiable, but the industry standard is almost always to just support the very basic, bare minimum of charsets... and then everything is built on top of that assumption, and the actual core setup configs at that level haven't been touched in 20+ years, and probably there's only 2 people at the entire org that even know... that such things exist, or what actual physical server they are running on.
It can be a bitch and a half to fundamentally rework an entire database system to support and uncommon character set, usually security minded practices will have you scrubbing out or charswapping or banning anything that isn't standard... and if there is any link in the chain, at any point, that doesn't properly support your new charset, well, it all blows up.
So... that is everything from front end to backend that has to come up with a solution, and the reality is, for just most of such modern software systems... that means you're going through god knows how many vendors and liscensed software, and now they all have to be compliant as well, in more or less exactly the same way.
Anyway, NAPA does exist in at least comprehensive character standards:
https://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry/language-subtag-registry
Type: variant
Subtag: fonnapa
Description: North American Phonetic Alphabet
Description: Americanist Phonetic Notation
Added: 2016-06-24
So it should be theoretically possible.
...
Another... weird aspect to this is... NAPA is not like the actual written characters that the Musqueam, or any other Peoples of the Salish Sea... actually ever used, historically.
It is a modern, academic alphabet, similar to IPA, primarily developed out of trying to basically reverse engineer almost entirely oral, spoken languages.
It is not something any of them ever historically used as a written character set, outside of modern academia and modern attempts to revive various languages of various peoples, to encourage their use and prevent the languages from going extinct.
Similar to NAPA is Saanich, or SENĆOŦEN, or Sənčáθən.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saanich_dialect
This writing system is used by the some of the Saanich peoples, academics and modern language revival movements... very roughly speaking, the Saanich peoples/languages are a subset of the broader group of Salish peoples/languages
...
Another problem with this realm is that... there is no 100% respected as an authority standard on how exactly to use or implement exactly which characters in NAPA to represent exactly which sounds... so... different specific Peoples, Tribes, Academics, etc, may be using different characters within NAPA for the same sound.
Its all very confusing from the standpoint of a database / data entry software dev trying to figure out how to actually implement this.
I found this interesting since it's basically about unicode support, so I did some research. This article seems bullshit, it seems like rhe residents are expected to use the english version of the streetname (Musqueamview) and not the indigenous one with uncommon letters. So, the problems described is totally fabricated. But also: databases shouldn't forbid uncommon unicode letters if it isn't called for.
But also: databases shouldn't forbid uncommon unicode letters if it isn't called for.
I stumble across this issue quite often. When you fill out a form for US customs, you are both required to provide exact data and you are only allowed a-z, 0-9, and some punctuation. That you cannot fulfil both because they are mutually exclusive does not cross their blessed little minds.
Updating databases to support anything other than that which would run on a 1970s mainframe costs the sort of money that eats into C-level's yacht funds, so it won't happen. These are the people who when faced with the "pick two from done right, done quick and done cheap" will never pick the first one.
Or in other words, if your name contains something outside the English alphabet's A-Z, you're out of luck. They'll give you an approximation you don't want and you'll like it. Lower case? What's that? You're Irish and your surname has an apostrophe? F**k you, that's in the bin, you're OBRIEN now.
I was about to suggest SHXWMATHKWAYAMASAM as something that would be bound to work, but it's 18 characters, and, being two more than a power of two, that all but guarantees that someone will truncate it at 16. Sigh.
Updating databases to support anything other than that which would run on a 1970s mainframe costs the sort of money that eats into C-level’s yacht funds, so it won’t happen.
Even so, multiple strategies to include unicode characters in ASCII exist. *sigh*
Putting it in a DB is the easy part.
It’s support in a thousand other systems that deal with addresses that’s the real problem.
For something like a street address, interoperability is a hell of a lot more important than culturally preferred spelling.
More than three syllables, too complicated for the average American.
w isn't even a real letter
Nice trolling, dude.
šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm Street (pronounced sh-MUS-quee-um-AW-
My closest attempt at pronouncing that:
echo 'šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm' | aplay -c 1 -f u8 -r 2000 -t raw -
as written it should be pronounced
shw-meth-quey-em-ass-em
where the shw is throaty - is it different because of the language?
are you thinking because of the use of IPA characters? because those have defined sounds only within the IPA.
Is this not IPA? I thought the article said it was
it's the alphabet the BC first nations use. it uses similar characters but not with ipa pronunciations.
TIL - thanks
Yet another anglosaxon government suppressing non anglosaxon culture
Anglo-Saxon? Lmao what a bizarre way to talk. Not that it even makes sense considering Anglo-Saxon settlers in the US weren't even close to being the majority.
It's down to unicode support. Not a plot from Anglo-Saxons to keep others in their place lol
To be fair, not considering unicode support a priority is a pretty damn English-language-centric attitude.