LINGUIST List 33.2244
Fri Jul 08 2022
Review: Applied Linguistics: Cook (2022)
Editor for this issue: Amalia Robinson <amalialinguistlist.org>
Date: 28-Jun-2022
From: Geoffrey Sampson <sampson
cantab.net>
Subject: The Language of the English Street Sign
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AUTHOR: Vivian Cook
TITLE: The Language of the English Street Sign
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2022
REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of Sussex
SUMMARY
The term “street sign” in Vivian Cook’s title covers every category of graphic communication standardly encountered by pedestrians or drivers on city streets: they range from traffic signs erected (or painted on the road surface) by local authorities as instructions, warnings, or advice to motorists (e.g. “no entry”, “low bridge ahead”, “turn left for Morpeth” – these signs communicate largely or wholly via conventional nonlinguistic symbols rather than English words), through commercial advertisements of many kinds, on hoardings, in shop windows, etc., and names labelling public buildings and private houses, to memorials, and more. “English” in the book title is intended geographically rather than as a language name: Cook’s purview is specifically street signs as encountered in cities in England at the present day.
Cook’s approach is to sample the universe of English street signs in two complementary ways. On one hand he has exhaustively surveyed every street sign visible during one three-month period on two commercial streets in one city, the north-eastern seaport Newcastle-on-Tyne; since this inevitably omitted some distinctive sign categories, for instance these two streets happen to contain no churches or government offices, Cook supplements this exhaustive survey with a broader and less systematic survey of signs observed over a longer period elsewhere in Newcastle and in Colchester, a smaller but older city in a different region of England. (Colchester is reckoned England’s oldest city, having been founded by the Romans.)
It is particularly relevant to make the point that “English” in Cook’s title does not mean the English language, because the two Newcastle streets chosen for the exhaustive survey overlap with Newcastle’s “Chinatown”, hence many signs discussed are written partly or wholly in Chinese. Restricting coverage to England is significant; in my experience the ranges and types of signs elsewhere in Europe are not very different from English signs (except of course for the languages used), but street signs in England do differ to some extent from those in other English-speaking countries. In the USA and Australia, street names are displayed at junctions on poles carrying pairs of nameplates at right-angles, but in Britain (and everywhere I have been in Europe) each street is independently labelled with signs on walls of buildings within that street. When I lived in the USA in the late 1960s, lettering styles on street signs were noticeably different from those usual in Britain (from a British perspective, American signs then had a distinctly nineteenth-century flavour) – though on flying visits in 1990–91 I had the impression that the difference had greatly reduced.
Cook’s Chapter 1 establishes a framework of analysis, spelling out the different types of function served by signs of various kinds, and dividing the range of surfaces which can bear signs into meaningful categories (for instance, there is a systematic difference between the types of sign liable to appear above versus below the fascia board on the frontage of a shop, and what appears on that board will be different from either). Chapter 2 introduces orthographic considerations: some kinds of street sign, for instance shop names, are unusual with respect to English orthographic norms in sometimes being displayed vertically rather than horizontally; and lettering styles commonly used differ from one sign category to another. In Chapter 3, Cook links his topic to the concerns of more central areas of linguistics, for instance he discusses the limited range of grammatical constructions found in many categories of street sign, and their use of punctuation marks and capitalization.
Chapter 4 is about material aspects of signs: what physical surfaces they appear on (metal, stone, paper) and how the inscriptions are made (painted, carved in stone, cast in metal, etc.). Chapters 5 and 6 are about two particular categories of sign: respectively, street names, and “controlling signs” – the latter includes instructions to motorists, but also, for instance, “no smoking”, or a sign on a lintel reading “Watch yer heed!” (which uses non-standard spelling to suggest a Geordie – i.e. north-east England – pronunciation of “watch your head”).
Chapter 7 analyses the connotations of different lettering styles found in street signs, e.g. serifed versus sans-serif faces, faces imitating handwriting, etc. Chapter 8 discusses signs using languages other than English – not just Chinese or bilingual Chinese/English signs in the Newcastle Chinatown, but for instance a sign on a bar advertising the availability of “cocktails, pastry, juice” in Italian rather than English – few English people would understand the words, so the sign is presumably intended to foster an ambience rather than to supply information. The closing Cchapter 9 summarizes themes that have emerged over the course of the book.
Cook’s bibliography extends over ten pages of small print. It must be a rather comprehensive listing of the literature on this specialized area of linguistics. (Since house names are a sign category covered by Cook, is a pity that his references do not include the interesting 2020 book ‘Sunnyside’ by Laura Wright, which I reviewed in Linguist List 32.1097; perhaps it appeared too recently for Cook to have encountered it while writing his own book.)
Any book on an inherently visual topic calls for illustrations, and this book is particularly well provided with them. Most pages seem to include at least one photograph of a street sign – many pages show up to five or six signs each. In the printed book these are in black and white, but the e-book version displays them in colour.
EVALUATION
Cook’s survey is remarkably comprehensive; in years to come, anyone wanting to study the nature of street signage in England at this point in history will do well to consult this book. For those of us living today it is fair to say that the book holds few surprises, but that is no criticism. Thorough surveys of an area of life carried out while the facts are fully available to observation is a valuable form of scholarship.
Unfortunately, while the book scores highly for comprehensiveness, it cannot be equally praised for accuracy. There are mistakes of many different kinds.
For instance, when Cook introduces his notation conventions on p. 19, he attempts to render the words “no pedestrians” in IPA phonetic script, but he wrongly uses the same symbol for the vowels of the first two syllables of “pedestrians”. A stone-carved name sign over a public building called Cordwainers Hall is said (p. 51) to date from “the 1860s” and to have “letter forms appropriate for [its] time”, yet the illustration clearly shows the date 1838 in Roman numerals. Cook states (p. 35) that the letters H J U W were late inventions, missing from the classical Latin alphabet; that is true of J U W but not H, which occurred in the earliest Latin inscriptions (Diringer 1968: 420) and evolved from a letter of the original Semitic alphabet from which Latin writing ultimately descended.
Cook has a special animus against anything smacking of linguistic prescription; he cites as an example the “self-nominated pundits” who object to the use of apostrophes where no apostrophes belong in standard usage. As an example he cites a hastily-handwritten sign in a shop window, “Special Clearance!!! inside ..... ′Till Stock Lasts′ ”, where he thinks the writer has marked “till” as an abbreviation of “until”, failing to realize that these “have been distinct words since Old English” (p. 80). I don’t doubt that the shopkeeper was ignorant of that fact (as was I), but it is beside the point. From Cook’s illustration it is obvious that what he has taken for an abbreviation sign is actually the first half of a pair of inverted commas surrounding the three-word phrase – a purist might object that the phrase is not a quotation, but “till” was certainly not being marked as an abbreviation of “until”.
On p. 174 Cook discusses the nameboard of a Chinese restaurant called “Heihei”, which displays that name (in all lower-case) below two columns of circles and horizontal and vertical lines, either column being a vertical mirror image of the other. Cook takes these to be the restaurant name in Chinese script, and calls the mirror-image feature “a witty touch for the Chinese reader”. Try as I might, I cannot see the sign as Chinese script: it appears to be simply a piece of modernistic decoration. (One basic shape that never appears in Chinese script is the circle.)
It would be tedious to quote further examples of miscellaneous errors; there are many. A specially problematic area is typography. Considering how much of the book is devoted to this topic, in Chapter 7 and elsewhere, Cook seems to know surprisingly little about it. His Figure 7.1 illustrates differences between typefaces by showing four signs in fonts which he names, but in two cases his identification seems to be wrong: I cannot believe that “Pay here” is Gill Sans, and “Nos 23–24” is certainly not Bodoni. (Typefaces are most reliably identified from their overall jizz, and it is dangerous to rely on detailed features of individual letters because long-established faces spawn ranges of “reinterpretations” which sometimes alter such details. But Gill Sans does not have a curved tail to y, and Bodoni normally has serifs at both ends of C; I take “Nos 23–24” to be a heavy weight of Times.) A shop name on a fascia in Figure 7.8 is said to be “from the Times New Roman family” (p. 150), but it is nothing like Times; it may be the American face Ben Franklin.
I wonder what Cook thinks “serif” means. He describes an inscription at the top of a church notice board as in a “light serif letter style” (p. 144), though even with a magnifying glass I see no hint of serifs. Conversely, on the same page he discusses the black-letter script used in the Middle Ages, before it was replaced by roman and italic in the Renaissance, as a “sans serif letter style”. It is unusual to apply the serifed/sans-serif distinction to black-letter, but if one did, black-letter would have to be called serifed. Where the basic shape of a letter has a line ending in mid-air, as at the lower left and upper right corners of N, in black-letter script the line-end will have a cross-piece arresting the eye: that is what a serif is (though black-letter serifs are far larger and showier than those of roman script).
Sometimes Cook blurs what I would see as significant analytic distinctions. He discusses the fact that certain types of street sign use vocabulary which would count as archaic in other contexts, e.g. “alight” for getting off a bus or train. This observation is correct and worth making. But one of his examples is “fishmongers” for a shop selling wet fish. This word is admittedly not frequent in the 21st century, but that is because what it refers to has become rare. In the 1950s every High Street had a shop dedicated to selling wet fish, but nowadays these are usually bought either from a counter within a supermarket or from an open-air market stall. Where the specialized shops survive, though, I know no other way of talking about them than “fishmongers” (“wet fish shop” is precise but scarcely colloquial; the shorter “fish shop” would equally or more likely refer to a shop selling fried fish and chips). There is surely a difference between words which have become an old-fashioned way of referring to things that are common enough, and a word which remains the colloquial way of naming a thing that is now rare.
I wonder how Cook can seriously believe that “Nothing better demonstrates the low status of the indigenous languages of the UK such as Welsh and Scottish Gaelic … as [sic, for “than”] their virtual absence from street signs in England” (p. 161). Welsh and Gaelic have no particular status, high or low, in England; scarcely anyone in England knows them, and the few who do necessarily use English for everyday purposes. If English street signs had to be written in the native languages of everyone in the country, they would be larger than the surfaces available to display them.
In sum: this is a worthwhile book (apart from anything else, the illustrations speak for themselves). But with more care it could have been very much better.
REFERENCES
Diringer, D. 1968. The Alphabet: a key to the history of mankind, 3rd edn (vol. 1). Hutchinson.
Wright, L. 2020. Sunnyside: a sociolinguistic history of British house names. Oxford University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Chinese Studies from Cambridge University, and his academic career was spent partly in Linguistics and partly in Informatics, with intervals in industrial research. After retiring as professor emeritus from Sussex University in 2009, he spent several years as Research Fellow at the University of South Africa. He has published contributions to most areas of Linguistics, as well as to other subjects. His latest book is ''The Linguistics Delusion'' (2017).
Page Updated: 08-Jul-2022