Technology

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.

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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.

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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

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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.