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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

In what universe is "Ten" a more common pronunciation of "X" than "X"? You might have an argument for "II" or "III", but I'll be shocked if any street in USA is named after the tenth generation of really unimaginative namers.

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Do you think Google is having someone go through the tens of thousands of street names?

Or do you think they had a team (on a completely different project or perhaps company) write a text to speech function that wasn't well suited for directions.

Streets have lots of numbers after all. People frequently have numbers in their name.

I could see that for Google Maps v1.0. I think we're past that point now. There's no reason they should still be using libraries suited to parsing the names of forgotten European monarchs.

They’re neither forgotten, unused, nor is it a nomenclature used exclusively by Royals; nor are all the Royals that use this fashion dead or out of power.

Oh for Pete's sake, absolute bloody conspiracy level nonsense, NOBODY sat there twirling their villainous mustache and programmed an exception to hardcode pronouncing X as 10, it's simply a matter of the training and sample data having access to some type of corpus that contained a great deal of Roman numerals.

(Leave the software engineering to the software engineers)

>> to some type of corpus that contained a great deal of Roman numerals.

I wager that there is more text online about Louis XIV than of Malcom X. Certainly there are many more books on that epic corner of French history than one modern US leader. Then there are all the British kings. Point an AI at the internet and it likely would decide that roman numerals are most often pronounced as number than letters. Malcom X would be rare an exception that might need to be hard coded.

For sure. If we're going with the common pronunciation of Roman numerals in English names, it's "Tenth". E.g., We don't say "Henry Ford III" as "Henry Ford Three" but "Henry Ford the Third".

There’s a Louis XIV Street in New Orleans (and I imagine elsewhere).

You mean Louis 'Ziv', according to Google

Putting Louis XIV in Google translate, I get the correct "Louis the Fourteenth" and "Louis Quatorze" pronounciations in English and French, respectively. However, it has to be uppercased, otherwise it spells the letters.

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