Philidelphia
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Philadelphia seems to attract Google Maps weirdness. The last time I opened a map to verify some local directions, it popped up an image of the Grand Concourse ceiling of the 30th St. Amtrak station, identified as "Philidelphia Train ticket office":
And the Quadrangle, a student residence where I live, always gets identified as weird fragments of nearby stuff — most recently as the (entire?) Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, which is actually a dozen or so (other) buildings in the neighborhood:
In fact "the Quadrangle" is the whole rectangle + triangle, not just the western triangular part, and it contains three designated "College Houses", not just "Riepe". In the past, I used to click the Google Maps "Suggest an edit" button, correcting labels like "Pathology Laboratory" and "Helen's Hair House". But now I just accept the metaphors.
Jerry Packard said,
September 30, 2026 @ 9:13 am
Googlemaps didn’t exist when I lived in Fluff’ya, but it has its share of linguistic anomalies not least of which is the ‘Philly O’ and ‘wooder’ for ‘water’. The linguistics lab was right near Mark’s triangle-quadrangle. My 42-yr-old son was born at HUP and I worked right across the street (as did Victor) in Williams Hall for 7 years. I was standing right there when a cop cursed, tackled and cuffed a crook right next to a cart selling breakfast bacon-egg hoagies, and I knew many a colleague who got mugged if they made the mistake of walking further west than 42nd st.
Paul Clapham said,
September 30, 2026 @ 11:19 am
Here's a theory: There is a small group of fun-loving students who are sending in these weird things to Google as "corrections". Not easy to test, I know…
J.W. Brewer said,
September 30, 2026 @ 2:09 pm
One can find a few other instances of "Philidelphia" out there, including in google-books-corpus versions of texts you would think would have been professionally proofread before publication. One thing about English orthography is that it's probably even harder to reverse-engineer spelling from pronunciation for reduced vowels than unreduced ones, and the second vowel here is reduced.
The other question, though, is what it's reduced to. Schwa or something else? With one candidate for "something else" being closer to KIT than schwa is, i.e. the one in the second syllable of "roses" for those who distinguish that from "Rosa's." Which of those do I have in Philadelphia? I'm actually not sure now that I'm self-conscious about it. But the non-schwa alternative ("a distinct near-close central unrounded vowel [ɪ̈] (or equivalently [ɨ̞]," to quote wikipedia) might go better with an "i" spelling.
Surely over the decades Labov must have had a grad student or two gather data on exactly which reduced vowel local speakers use here (or what the ratio was, if it varied)? It seemed seasonally appropriate to consult Hall & Oates' "Fall in Philadelphia" (from 1972), and in the chorus when they sing the title in harmony I'm not entirely convinced they're both using the same reduced vowel.
The other source of spelling variation might be "analogy-to-Philip" versus "analogy-to-philanthropic." But do those have different vowels in their respective second syllables? Does it vary by speaker?
Jerry Packard said,
September 30, 2026 @ 2:34 pm
@J.W. Brewer
In my idiolect it seems to be reduced to a schwa. Ironically, Labov & students may not ever have asked that Q, but that would be hard to believe.
Philip Taylor said,
September 30, 2026 @ 3:02 pm
Your son was 42 years of age when he was born, Jerry ? Crikey, that must have been one hell of a gestation period !
David Morris said,
September 30, 2026 @ 3:27 pm
Google Maps locates a book store in the middle of an intersection near my suburb's train station. In eight years of crossing that intersection almost every day, I've never seen it. But then again it doesn't show on either the aerial or street view.
david said,
September 30, 2026 @ 4:09 pm
https://www.openstreetmap.org/ seems to be more reliably labeled and to have more features.
Jerry Packard said,
September 30, 2026 @ 5:18 pm
@Philip Taylor
Yes, I like to tell the story of Carol being in labor for 3 days before they pulled him out with forceps. He was precocious in more ways than one.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 30, 2026 @ 5:49 pm
I have intruded on Professor Packard's privacy by consulting his online CV to determine exactly which years he was in Philadelphia. And it was after Frank Rizzo was no longer in office and after the Phillies had finally won the World Series, so the golden age was over and the distinctiveness of local speech (which had supposedly once induced Labov to give up a pretty stable job in NYC …) was no doubt already on the wane.
Scott P. said,
September 30, 2026 @ 8:23 pm
Jerry,
When I came to work at Penn in 2006, I too was warned against going west of 42nd street, which was hilarious to me as 1) the whole area around Spruce between 42nd and 50th street was in the process of extremely rapid gentrification, and 2) the areas that weren't yet gentrifying seemed to be neighborhoods largely occupied by middle-class African American homeowners. I don't know if it was outdated information or residual racial anxiety, but I felt perfectly safe all throughout West Philly.
Jerry Packard said,
September 30, 2026 @ 9:29 pm
@ Scott P.
Well, I’m glad to hear that!
Peter Cyrus said,
October 1, 2026 @ 4:37 am
On the topic of reduced vowels in English, I've been transcribing using the following guidelines. I'd be grateful for comments.
1. Most short vowels reduce to [ᵻ] (close back spread)
2. Open short vowels reduce to [ɐ]
3. Before [ɫ], all vowels reduce to [ə]
4. Long vowels (except /aː/ and /ɔː/) are diphthongs, and reduce by losing the offglide
5. Suffixes that start with /i/ don't reduce: they remain [ɪ] ([i] before [ŋ]), so bassist and basest are distinct.
6. Vowels reduced to [ɐ] in the dictionary form may be further reduced to [ᵻ] in speech. Carrot can be pronounced with either, but caret only the latter.
Obviously, there's a lot of diversity around vowel reduction, but the idea of guidelines is to produce a form that's acceptable, i.e. within the range of what's heard.
AntC said,
October 1, 2026 @ 6:06 am
I'd appreciate if those in other locales than mine could do a GMaps search for 'Bream Bay', in Northland, New Zealand.
There's a few offshore islands — the "Hen and Chickens"/Taranga and Marotiri in Te Reo. What other narratives show up? I'm seeing "(pulo sa Awstralya)". 'Pulo' I guess is Filipino/Tagalog. Emphatically these islands are not Australian.
I have pointed this out more than a year ago through GMaps feedback. Nothing.
Philip Taylor said,
October 1, 2026 @ 10:28 am
As returned in response to a Google Maps search for
Bream Bay, Northland, New Zealand
from the U.K. —
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bream+Bay/@-35.9369328,174.4444986,12z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x6d0c9a23fe8be3c9:0x2a00ef6166598a10!8m2!3d-35.9438332!4d174.5431867!16s%2Fm%2F07k90cr?authuser=0&entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDkyOC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Warning : this comment contains a hyperlink — it may well vanish without trace shortly after being published.
david said,
October 1, 2026 @ 12:52 pm
If you go to the wikipedia page and click on the longlat coordinates and then choose google maps it shows the bay and names the islands as Hen and Chicken Islands. I guess Awstralya means Southern in this context.
HS said,
October 1, 2026 @ 7:39 pm
I guess Awstralya means Southern in this context
No, "Awstralya" means Australia. There is a version of Wikipedia in Cebuano, one of the languages of the Philippines, which lists various Hen Islands around the world –
https://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hen_Island
This Cebuano Wikipedia page includes one off Tasmania in Australia labelled in brackets "pulo sa Awstralya" which clearly means Island of Australia. Other islands are labelled in brackets "pulo sa Canada", "pulo sa Tinipong Bansaand" which clearly means the United States, and "pulo sa Ireland". The page also includes Hen Island in the Hen and Chicken Islands in New Zealand but for some reason it doesn't label it "pulo sa New Zealand".
Google Maps shows that Hen Island off Tasmania is accompanied by a Chicken Island, but neither of them are labelled "pulo".
https://www.google.com/maps/@-43.5672659,146.5947289,15.48z?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDkyOS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
So Google Maps seems to be somehow confusing the New Zealand Hen Island with the Tasmanian Hen Island, but why it would want to label either of them in Cebuano is beyond me.
(Hen Island, by the way, is a special place in the history of New Zealand ornithology and conservation. It is rat-free and for the best part of a century it was the only surviving refuge of the North Island Saddleback, though populations have now been established in other safe refuges. The South Island Saddleback was just saved from extinction in the early 1960s when ship rats invaded its last refuge, Big South Cape Island, though several other native species which were only found there unfortunately could not be saved.)
stephen said,
October 3, 2026 @ 7:52 pm
Some years ago I was looking up information on an optometrist in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Google Maps gave me an address…the optometrist had moved out of that location 35 years ago, before Google even existed!
Okay, to be fair, that optician has retired, and I just looked on Google Maps and he isn't listed now, so that was updated.
Mark Liberman said,
October 6, 2026 @ 5:59 am
@stephen: "…the optometrist had moved out of that location 35 years ago…"
Many years pre-Google, I once stopped to ask an elderly woman for directions, and was told to head on down the road "and turn right where the water tower used to be".
ardj said,
October 6, 2026 @ 9:48 am
@stephen
Following Professor Liberman, the habit is not confined to the USA. In Denmark,and years ago, an elderly aunt of my wife's directed her to turn where the 42 bus used to stop (bussen plejede at stoppe der, or something like that).