2018.6.7 Map of Massachusetts municipalities colored by syllable stress of names

Whew! That was a long nap. Did I miss anything?

I've got a bunch of stuff queued up to post here if I ever get around to it — for instance, the Massachusetts town-name suffixes map I mentioned five years ago. First though, here's another linguistically-oriented Massachusetts map I prepared about a year ago. The municipalities are colored by number of syllables in their names, and by which syllable is stressed. Details on the coloring scheme are explained below the map. As usual, click the map to toggle between the small version and a larger version with names of municipalities shown.

Map of Massachusetts towns colored by syllable stress of their names

The following are the basic criteria for the color choices:

Hence:

A surprising number of the names have somewhat ambiguous primary stress; for instance, many or all of the ones starting with cardinal directions or "New" seem pretty heavily stressed on both the first and second syllables, but in those cases the second syllable seemed to have a slight edge. (If you consider both first and second syllables to be stressed, you get an antibacchius in the 3-syllable case and a major ionic or double trochee in the 4-syllable case. Just to be complete with the prosodic exploration here.)

Not sure what this is useful for besides writing raps, but it's kind of fun to e.g. see all ten monosyllabic towns at a glance, or chant the 3-syllable towns in a Migos flow.

Hey, I just noticed it's just over ten years since the start of POIB! Cool. Here's hoping for a more active decade on here???