Google Maps and stress

To continue where I left off: Mapsy’s reading of northern Italian place-names and street names, beginning at Malpensa airport, was unremarkable until we got to Bergamo, which I heard as “Bergamo”. At first I thought of this as confirmation of the “misrule” that I recently wrote about, namely that the tendency of English-speakers is to stress unfamiliar vowel-final words on the penultimate syllable. But on second thought it didn’t seem right: I don’t think most Americans would say “Bergamo”. If anything, the opposite might be true, as in the case of Guernica (the Spanish spelling of the Basque place-name Gernika), which I mostly hear as Gernika. Most English-speakers I hear stress such names as Attica, Ankara, Serpico correctly, while angina (traditionally /ænˈʤaɪnə/) is often heard as /’ænʤənə/.

The extended misrule, then, seems to be that vowel-final words with a single consonant between the final and penultimate vowels, but a doubled one or a cluster between the penultimate and antepenultimate, are more likely to have the stress on the antepenultimate. Mapsy’s Bergamo, then, would seem to be an anomaly, as is the usual American (but not British) pronunciation of paprika, and the timpano that was heard in the move Big Night.  But then the usual pronunciation of Capri as Capri is another anomaly.

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Traveling with Google, again

I spent the month of April traveling in Europe with my wife, as usual with the help of Google Maps. I was pleased to discover that GM now locates Prague in Czechia, something that I have long been advocating as the informal name of the country officially called the Czech Republic, the same as Slovakia instead of Slovak Republic, France instead of French Republic, and so on. I was also pleased to find out that, unlike two years ago, GM now knows that the RER B line in Paris runs not only south but also north, and is the direct way to get from Gare du Nord to Charles de Gaulle Airport. GM doesn’t seem to know the buses in Paris yet, but give it time. Everywhere else, it has them down, and the vaporetti in Venice as well.

When it comes to giving time estimates, though, GM is hampered by its seemingly two-dimensional vision of the world. That is, it disregards the fact that in navigating through multimodal stations (or even entering or leaving simple ones) one often has to move vertically by several levels on stairs, escalators and elevators, all of which take time which GM does not calculate.  The same applies, in GM’s  time estimates for walking, to waiting at stoplights. I have usually found driving times, on the other hand, to be surprisingly accurate.

But my main topic is the spoken turn-by-turn navigation that I have been increasingly relying on for driving and walking in unfamiliar locations. I call the disembodied female voice GPSy (pronounced like gypsy) or Mapsy.

In using GPSy locally in the Bay Area, my wife and I have sometimes at chuckled at some of her quirky pronunciations, such as, when referring to San Rafael, saying the second part as a three-syllable word (like the name Raphael) rather than the two-syllable version (/rəˈfɛl/) that is common here.

But, on a trip to Quebec last year, I discovered a lot more. The revelation came when a street in Quebec City called 1^re rue (Première rue) was called “one-ree roo”.  It became obvious that Mapsy reads foreign names — by design, I am sure — as an American unfamiliar with the local language would read them.

I understand from Wikipedia that Mapsy’s voice is electronic. How it is generated — let alone how it’s programmed to read place-names, especially foreign ones — is a mystery to me. Maybe Mark Liberman knows.

But I intend to use Mapsy’s pronunciation to explore more ramifications of what I have called the “misrule” of stress. In my next post, probably.

 

Stress “misrule” expanded

When I recently wrote that a kind of default rule for stress in unfamiliar words encountered by English-speakers is to stress the penultimate in words ending in a vowel, I had not come to grips with two major exceptions. (I am not referring to familiar words whose pronunciation is well established, such as America or Africa, which do not obey the rule.)

The first is that, if the penultimate vowel is /i/ (whether spelled i, e, or y, but not ae) and there is no consonant between it and the final vowel, then the stress falls on the antepenultimate, as in words like radio, rodeo (but not when the e is read as /eɪ/), mania, trachea, Tokyo, Romeo, names ending in -ia (Sonia, Tania, Slovakia, Peoria etc, with some exceptions like Maria, Sophia, Tanzania, and Lucia when given an “Italian” reading, as well as some idiosyncratic surnames like Scalia and Renteria) or –ya (Sonya, Tanya, Marya, Kenya, Libya). Among common words, idea is another exception to the exception; among names, Korea is another; Althea is ambiguous.

The second is that when the penultimate and antepenultimate vowels are separated by more than a simple consonant (even a doubled consonant), while only a simple one separates penultimate and final, then the default stress is also on the antepenultimate. I will discuss this in an upcoming post.