We recently took a GPS unit to LA, and it had trouble with even the most mudane Spanish-derived street names (think “turn left on cab-brill-oh”.) I shudder to think of what it does with the Native-American inspired names in places like Washington. However, it seems like with time we might start favoring the way machines pronounce them. And I wonder if we will finally reach an agreement on contested street names- like “Don Julio” in Sacramento which is equally referred to as “Don Jool-io” and Don Who-lio".
So, do you think GPS will change how we deal with street names?
That’s not an issue unique to the US I guess - a lot of street names elsewhere refer to proper names originating from another language. (I came upon a Sautierstraße in Freiburg, Germany, and was perplexed until I realized that it probably was not named “Sow-Animal-Street” (as in lady pig) but after some Frenchman called Sautier.)
I expect that eventually the street databases that navigation systems use will contain pronounciation e.g. as an IPA string as just another data point associated with a street (just as now street class, one-way-ness and speed limited are associated in the database with a street or part of a street.)
My Mother’s GPS, currently the only one I’ve ever had the opportunity to play with, doesn’t pronounce street names at all. You enter your destination, it gives ddirections, and “you have reached your destination” and that’s all. Seems plenty good enough for most purposes.
In Texas, we have certain roads that are designated FM (for Farm to Market). For some reason best known to herself, the nice GPS lady has decided that this is best handled by
“Turn left onto Federated States of Micronesia 973”
There’s no way that GPS will override local pronunciation. I have to admit it is damn painful to hear the mangled Spanish pronunciations. There is no reason that you could not add local pronunciation of names to the GPS database. It will take a fairly large amount of space, but once we start having 100GB solid state memory it won’t be a problem.
How do GPS systems pronounce the name of “Houston Street” in Manhattan? The street name long predates the Tennessee/Texas politician, and is properly pronounced “How-ston”, not “You-ston”.
Who do they do with names like Nunda, NY (Which should be “nun-day”) or Chili, NY (“Chie -lie”)
In listening to my parent’s GPS, I found that syllables were generally pronounced with emphasis fairly evenly distributed across all the syllables. This was at least as amusing/distracting as pronouncing things with funny vowel sounds.
(And then there was the time it got stuck-- it kept telling us that each new road we were on was U S Thir Tee Six. We knew better.)
But I don’t really see that GPS systems pronouncing names funny is likely to strongly influence regionalized pronuciations.
There is a Boston area women who has a really cool job but it is probably very tedious. She serves as the voice for the Garmin car GPS units. She there day after day pronouncing list of roads, places, and things. There shouldn’t be any reason why she couldn’t pronounce Houston several different ways.
I don’t doubt that she could, if she knew that there are different pronunciations. The question is – does the company (and any enunciators, or voice-software programmers, or what have you) KNOW the correct pronunciations for each location?
More basic than text-to-speech in these devices is the mapping dataset. NAVTEQ is the 800-pound gorilla in this industry, (they are the data behind Mapquest and Google Maps, as well as most GPS navigators) and they really could stand to issue some fixes.
In my area, there’s a cross-town road called Willow Pass Road. NAVTEQ often either morphs it to the non-existent “Willow Passage” or the incorrect Willow Way, if your desired address happens to exist on that very short street.
FWIW, I just found that if you go to www.navteq.com, you can enter requests for updates and corrections there.
Most phonetics in the GPS-device market are produced by Acapela Group (http://www.acapela-group.com.) You should report incorrect pronunciations to your device manufacturer (Garmin, etc.) or to the data provider (NAVTEQ/TeleAtlas.)
[QUOTE=Troy McClure SF]
Cabrillo was Portuguese; therefore cuh-BRILL-oh is correct./QUOTE]It’s not known for certain whether Cabrillo was Portuguese or Spanish, but [ul]
[li]Cabrillo is the Spanish-language version (it’s Cabrilho in Portuguese), so there’s no good reason to pronounce it as if it were a Portuguese name.[/li][li]Neither Cabrillo nor Cabrilho would be pronounced “cuh-BRILL-oh” by a Portuguese speaker.[/li][/ul]
The street in San Francisco is pronounced “cuh-BRILL-oh” by locals because that’s the anglicized form. That doesn’t make it any less “authentic” IMHO – nobody insists on “Los Angeles” or “Mexico” have -g- and -ks- sounds respectively (as opposed to the original Spanish “h”) when one is speaking English.
IMHO, just like Houston (NYC) vs Houston (TX), there’s nothing wrong with different locales having different pronunciations; hence Cabrillo St in SF is anglicized, while Cabrillo College – and AFAIK most other entities named after the explorer – use the Spanish pronunciation.
[Talking of SF streets which GPS systems probably mispronounce, a few blocks North of Cabrillo St there’s CleMENT Street.]
[Hamsters ate the post above – don’t know how it got through with 0 characters!]
It’s not known for certain whether Cabrillo was Portuguese or Spanish, but [ul]
[li]Cabrillo is the Spanish spelling (it’s Cabrilho in Portuguese), so there’s no good reason to pronounce it as if it were a Portuguese name.[/li][li]Neither Cabrillo nor Cabrilho would be pronounced “cuh-BRILL-oh” by a Portuguese speaker.[/li][/ul]
The street in San Francisco is pronounced “cuh-BRILL-oh” by locals because that’s the anglicized form. That doesn’t make it any less “authentic” IMHO – nobody insists on “Los Angeles” or “Mexico” having -g- and -ks- sounds respectively (as opposed to the original Spanish “h”) when one is speaking English.
IMHO, just like Houston (NYC) vs Houston (TX), there’s nothing wrong with different locales having different pronunciations; hence Cabrillo St in SF is anglicized, while Cabrillo College – and AFAIK most other entities named after the explorer – use the Spanish pronunciation.
[Talking of SF streets which GPS systems probably mispronounce, a few blocks North of Cabrillo St there’s CleMENT Street.]
While rearranging the above post to clear it past the voracious hamsters that ate post #18, I ended up inverting the intended meaning.
Of course, what I meant to say was that nobody expects “Los Angeles” or “Mexico” to be pronounced with the Spanish “h” sound when the rest of the sentence is in English.
