cross-posted from: rss.ponder.cat/post/217784
Signposts on the Vancouver street bear the English name below the official Musqueam name, which is written in the North American Phonetic Alphabet.
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w isn’t even a real letter
Vancouver man says institutions unable to recognize new Indigenous street name
Submitted 3 weeks ago by grue@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://globalnews.ca/news/11265368/vancouver-man-institutions-new-indigenous-street-name/
Comments
RickyRigatoni@retrolemmy.com 3 weeks ago
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
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.
Uff@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yet another anglosaxon government suppressing non anglosaxon culture
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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
grue@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
To be fair, not considering unicode support a priority is a pretty damn English-language-centric attitude.
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 3 weeks ago
Nice trolling, dude.
Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm Street (pronounced sh-MUS-quee-um-AW-
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
My closest attempt at pronouncing that:
echo 'šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm' | aplay -c 1 -f u8 -r 2000 -t raw -funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
as written it should be pronounced
shw-meth-quey-em-ass-em
where the shw is throaty - is it different because of the language?
lime@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
are you thinking because of the use of IPA characters? because those have defined sounds only within the IPA.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
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?
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.
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.
Anyway, the sign in question appears to be written in NAPA:
…m.wikipedia.org/…/Americanist_phonetic_notation
Its basically similar to IPA, but designed for the rather varied, unique and distinct languages of Native North Americans.
NAPA does exist in at least comprehensive character standards:
www.iana.org/…/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.
It is a modern, academic alphabet, 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.
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/languahes 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.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I love how they put up the English name after the first outcry of “where do I send the ambulance again” fears.
Maxx0r@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
Treczoks@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.