33.2244, Review: Applied Linguistics: Cook (2022)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-2244. Fri Jul 08 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.2244, Review: Applied Linguistics: Cook (2022)

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Date: Fri, 08 Jul 2022 22:11:55
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: The Language of the English Street Sign

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36809417


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-1118.html

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).





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