[egypturnash]

Hell, you don’t even have to leave the US for this to happen. I live in New Orleans, where the street names are a mish-mash of English and French, with a sprinkling of Greek deities for flavor. While a lot of these names are mispronounced in common usage, Maps’ mispronunciations of these names are, as a rule, different mispronunciations than the ones that would come out of the mouth of a local.

It’s both hilarious and saddening, as I suspect a chance that the robo-mispronunciations might end up edging out the local ones over time.

This could be fixed by adding a field to every street name for “a series of phonemes that provide a close approximation of local pronunciation” and using that. But I doubt it ever will.

[stordoff]

> This could be fixed by adding a field to every street name for "a series of phonemes that provide a close approximation of local pronunciation"

Interestingly, this is essentially how a lot of Japanese forms (at least that I've seen) work. You have a name field, containing, say, 小島秀夫, then a field for the phonetic reading containing こじまひでお. Both are Kojima Hideo (typically Hideo Kojima in English), but the second is the phonetic (kana) form, whereas the first form of some names might be misread or have an unusual reading. You might also see it as furigana, where the phonetic/kana reading is written above the kanji form in small letters.

[lurgburg]

And in the case of Japanese, the extra field seems to be utterly essential, because the same characters in Kanji might be pronounced in radically different ways.

http://www.localizingjapan.com/blog/2011/02/13/sorting-in-ja...

  There are four Japanese women whose names you have to sort: Junko, Atsuko, Kiyoko, and Akiko.
  This does not seem difficult, until they each show you how they write their names in kanji:

      淳子 (Junko)
      淳子 (Atsuko)
      淳子 (Kiyoko)
      淳子 (Akiko)

[thrower123]

It's pretty comical in Maine as well, where there are a plethora of Native American place names, as well as a whole host of towns with well-known European city names, but wildly different pronunciations.

[tonyarkles]

Saskatchewan too. We have a mixture of First Nations-derived names and major streets named after people. Some of them are hard to grok where they went wrong; a prominent example is "Lewvan Drive" (a major thoroughfare here). It's pronounced "Loo-van", but Google somehow spits out as "Lew-chin". Regina Ave (Reg-eye-na) comes out as Reg-ee-na, which, ok... but that's the name of the city!

[derefr]

> Regina Ave (Reg-eye-na) comes out as Reg-ee-na, which, ok... but that's the name of the city!

Is it, though? I mean, if a city was named, centuries ago, by people who pronounced that name a particular way—and then language shifted in some way and every modern person pronounces the name differently... are the living people right? Or would it be "more correct" to pronounce the name the way that the people who came up with the name pronounced it?

(The Duchess of Argyll would certainly have pronounced the city's name as "Reg-ee-na", given that she named the city after the Latin word for "queen" [to refer to her mother, Victoria], and the Latin word is pronounced that way.)

It's a bit like asking whether the correct name for Saskatchewan itself is "Saskatchewan", or "Kisiskāciwani."

It's also a bit like asking whether the people of St. Louis are wrong to be pronouncing their city's name with a vocalized S.

[flyingfences]

...and plenty of once-French names sprinkled in, too... "Calliss"

[devnulloverflow]

It would not be too hard to add a field for an IPA version of the name. But populating the dataset would be a huge chicken-and-egg problem.