cross-posted from: https://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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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-
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
My closest attempt at pronouncing that:
echo 'šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm' | aplay -c 1 -f u8 -r 2000 -t raw -
Yet another anglosaxon government suppressing non anglosaxon culture
