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.

The following are the basic criteria for the color choices:

• The more syllables, the darker the color.
• Stress toward the beginning of a word results in a hue closer to red; toward the end of a word, closer to blue.

Hence:

• monosyllabically-named towns are colored white
• 2-syllable-name towns with stress on the first syllable (trochees) are light yellow
• 2-syllables with stress on the last syllable (iambs) are light cyan
• 3-syllables with stress at the start (dactyls) are orange
• 3's with middle stress (amphibrachs) are green
• 3's with final stress (anapests) would be blue if there were any
• 4's with exclusive stress on the 1st syllable (primus paeon — getting into the deep cuts here — in this case, Newburyport only) are dark red (actually, Newburyport could be considered a choriamb if you give secondary stress to the "port")
• 4's with initial main stress and secondary stress on the 3rd syllable (ditrochees — here, Attleboro and Middleborough) are brown (i.e. dark orange — shifted toward red for the primary stress, but a bit back toward blue for the secondary stress)
• 4's with stress on the 2nd syllable (secundus paeon) are avocadoish, i.e. dark yellow-green
• 4's with stress on the 3rd syllable (tertius paeon — Mattapoisett only) are dark blue-green
• The only 5 is North Attleboro, so it's the darkest, and with main stress on the 2nd syllable, its hue is yellowish (meanwhile, pentasyllables are not covered by the Wikipedia article)
• Some islands remain the initial white because I got lazy.

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???