Category: Linguistics

Putting it out there

Tomorrow (well actually later today, now that I check the clock) I’ll be presenting at the Michigan Linguistics Society, discussing the preliminary results of work I and a team of students conducted in the spring into variability in stop signs in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.  I’m really proud of this work, of which parts are published over at Stop: Toutes Directions, and particularly of the quality of the work of the various contributors, whose ideas have led me to think much more deeply about this subject than I otherwise would have.  I’ve been thrilled at the reception this admittedly oddball research project has received from my colleagues at Wayne State.  What started as a wacky idea I had a couple of years ago turned into an intensive research methods project, and now into a web site, conference presentations, and hopefully in the near future an edited volume.

Anyway, if by any chance anyone who is reading this is in the Detroit area and would like to stop by, it’s at Wayne State University (where I work) at the McGregor conference center, and there is a lot of interesting work being discussed.

The abstract for my paper follows below:

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What language is ‘STOP’?: language ideology and identity in Montreal stop signs

Due to the complexity of municipal politics, ethnolinguistic fragmentation, and provincial language policies and ideologies, public signs are important objects of linguistic discourse in Montreal,
Quebec, Canada. A pilot project in ‘contemporary epigraphy’ undertaken in Montreal reveals important spatial patterning in stop signs, one of the more visible objects on the city’s ‘signscape’.

There are three primary types of stop sign in Montreal: unilingual ARRET, unilingual STOP, and bilingual ARRET/STOP. Of these three, ARRET is by far the most common, with STOP predominant in anglophone regions, while ARRET/STOP signs are rare and are generally very worn, reflecting an earlier and rapidly vanishing state of the city’s signage practices. A quantitative analysis of these patterns reveals important disjuncts between the linguistic composition of communities and their signs.

By law, all public signs in the province of Quebec must be in French only, yet the prevalence of STOP signs in anglophone municipalities in Montreal seemingly violates this regulatory framework. The solution to this has been to define ‘stop’ (un stop) as a French word; STOP signs therefore are in fact unilingual French signs, even though they are not used in francophone municipalities. This leaves bilingual ARRET/STOP signs in a linguistically perilous position – which language is STOP in, and are these in fact legal signs at all? The question of whether STOP constitutes ‘good French’ has been an important one in recent public discussions of the subject, and remains an ongoing concern.

There is no overwhelming reason why stop signs should contain any inscription whatsoever, because the red octagon is a nearly universal, trans-linguistic ideogram. In a city such as Montreal, the majority of the populace can read and understand stop sign texts in either of Canada’s official languages. The choice of language usage is thus purely an ideological one, and reflects political interests and linguistic identities among the leaders of Montreal’s boroughs and independent towns.

Finally, important public/private tensions in Montreal’s language ideology are evident in stop signs due to the widespread practice of vandalism. Despite the prevalence of public French on stop signs, the vast majority of linguistically-identifiable vandalism is in English. Moreover, stop signs, as highly visible aspects of the city’s public material culture, are frequently vandalized in ways that reflect dissatisfaction with official language ideologies, and can thus highlight ongoing tensions.

People of the button

There’s an interesting little opinion piece in the New York Times today entitled ‘People of the Button‘, with an accompanying slideshow.  It’s an analysis of the ways in which American presidential candidates have used (or failed to use) Hebrew script on campaign buttons in an effort to appeal to Jewish voters, who are likely to be decisive in swing states like Florida. Of note:

Wendell Willkie in 1940 was the first candidate to make this sort of appeal, but in this case it was through the use of pseudo-Hebrew Latin letters that spelled his name (much like the pseudo-Chinese fonts used on many North American Chinese restaurant signs).   Apparently, also, it wasn’t very successful for Willkie!

The Gore 2000 buttons contrast ‘Gore’ with ‘Gore-nisht’ (Bush), a pun on Yiddish gornisht ‘nothing’.  I find it interesting, as a numbers guy, that the Gore button uses the Hebrew calendar year 5761 instead of 2000, but notates it in Western numerals, not the Hebrew alphabetic numerals commonly used in Hebrew calendrics, despite the use of Hebrew script for the candidates’ names.

Barack Obama is the first candidate to print buttons solely in Hebrew script, in contrast with John McCain whose ‘Jewish-Americans for McCain’ is strictly in Latin script.  Obama has also appealed to Jewish voters in the past by pointing out that his first name (of Arabic/Swahili origin) is cognate with Hebrew baruch ‘blessed’.

Review: Omniglot

Omniglot is an encyclopedic web site detailing the structure and history of the world’s writing systems.  Created in 1998 by Simon Ager, a web developer who is both polyglot (a learner of many languages) and linguist (scholar of language), it reminds me in so many ways of the Phrontistery – a site that began as one young man’s obsession and has turned into something more over the past decade.   I consider it to be the best online information source for writing systems; sure, you could go to Wikipedia, whose page on the topic is currently very good, but why bother?  If you can’t afford The World’s Writing Systems (Daniels and Bright 1996), the best print volume out there, then Omniglot is a good place to start.   I don’t know Ager personally, but I think when my book comes out that I’ll see what can be done about improving his numerals page, which really isn’t as informative as it could be.

Simon Ager also runs an Omniglot blog, which is primarily about second-language acquisition and topics related to multilingualism, particularly discussions of specific differences among words in different languages, but digresses into all sorts of other topics of interest to lingustically-minded anthropologists, such as literacy studies, animal communication, and language evolution.  It’s all written in a very accessible and engaging style, and requires virtually no background knowledge of the subjects in order to be enjoyed.  Refreshingly, he is always happy to admit when his knowledge of a topic is imperfect and to use his readers to learn more.

Recent posts of interest

Txtng nt bd 4 U

Television and stinky badgers

Writing systems and manuscripts

Works cited

Daniels, Peter T. and William Bright, eds. 1996. The World’s Writing Systems. New York: Oxford University Press.

Macarthur news: Stephen Houston

I woke up this morning to some exciting news for those of us involved in writing and literacy studies in anthropology.  Stephen Houston, professor of anthropology at Brown University, has been awarded one of this year’s Macarthur fellowships.   The Macarthur is probably the most prestigious award any social scientist or humanist can receive, providing $500,000 in funding over five years with absolutely no strings attached.

Steve is one of the most fascinating scholars I know, and his work on Maya hieroglyphic writing and iconography exemplifies the social and integrative approach to linguistics, epigraphy, and archaeology that motivates me.  His paper, ‘The archaeology of communication technologies’ is in my opinion the most important and accessible existing statement of this perspective; I foist it on my students at every opportunity (Houston 2004).  In it, he makes the case that archaeological decipherment needs to focus both on extracting meaning from ancient texts and on situating those writings in their sociocultural and political context.    Two years ago he and a team of Mesoamericanists published the (undeciphered, and possibly undecipherable) ‘Cascajal block’ in Science, exposing the scientific community at large to an artifact which seems likely to be the oldest Mesoamerican writing yet known (Martinez et al. 2006).   Because he is an anthropological archaeologist, his perspective on epigraphy is both rigorously social-scientific and unapologetically comparative.

I ought to mention that Steve is my ‘uncle’ in scholarly genealogy; he and my doctoral supervisor, the late Bruce Trigger, both studied under Michael Coe at Yale.   He has been of tremendous help to me in thinking about my book, and his kind invitation to me to participate in the School of Advanced Research seminar ‘The shape of script’ last year (edited volume to be out soon, I hope!) led to one of the most productive weeks of scholarly exchange in my life to date.

This award is obviously important to Steve, who now has the pleasurable burden of figuring out how best to use his Macarthur, but it also has ramifications for the field of archaeological decipherment as a whole.  I’m really excited about the attention that this news will draw to our small corner of the world.

Edit to add: Well, it seems as if this post is coming up on all sorts of search keywords related to Stephen Houston, so, welcome to newcomers!  I should probably include a couple of informative links:

Stephen Houston’s research page including publication list

Brown anthropology department page

Works cited

Houston, Stephen D. 2004. The archaeology of communication technologies. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 223-250.

Ma. del Carmen Rodríguez Martínez, Ponciano Ortíz Ceballos, Michael D. Coe, Richard A. Diehl, Stephen D. Houston, Karl A. Taube, and Alfredo Delgado Calderón. 2006. Oldest writing in the New World. Science 313(5793): 1610-1614.

The politics of pinyin

One of the understudied intersections of linguistics and material culture is what I would call ‘contemporary epigraphy’: the study of modern inscriptions, ranging from traditional subjects (monumental inscriptions) to things like public signs and graffiti.  In my work on numbers, I am constantly on the alert for unusual and interesting uses of number in public texts (see this, e.g.), and recently, I and a group of senior undergraduates at McGill undertook a quantitative, spatial, and linguistically-focused survey of stop signs in Montreal, which has become the ongoing Stop: Toutes Directions project.   This sort of work combines the rigor of linguistics and grammatology (the study of writing systems) with the social analysis of archaeology and urban geography and the textual focus of classical epigraphy and semiotics.

For this reason, I was very interested to see in the news that Taiwan is simplifying its romanization of Chinese writing and will be replacing a huge number of public signs.  Essentially, before now, there was no standard way to transliterate Chinese into a Roman script (not to mention the difficulties in transliterating Chinese into Chinese script).  The existence of multiple standards can lead to all sorts of confusion, because, as the article linked above points out, ‘Minquan Road’ and ‘Minchuan Road’ may in fact be the same road named using two different standards.   This Wikipedia article illustrates the enormous difficulties this might present.  The cost of changing signs that are not in the variant chosen as the new standard (hanyu pinyin) will be considerable.

The pinyin system that has been chosen by the Taiwanese government is probably the most common one used today, primarily due to its official acceptance in the People’s Republic of China (i.e. the mainland) since the 50s and internationally since the 70s.  The article presents the most recent Taiwanese reform as one aimed at international visitors / non-native Chinese speakers, and undoubtedly that is part of the answer.  But any change that brings Taiwan closer to China is not only a business decision but also a sociopolitical one.  The article notes, “Ma’s predecessor resisted the writing system to snub China, which claims sovereignty over the self-ruled island, critics say,” which is no doubt another part of the story.   This change in sign policy is part of ongoing tensions between pro-independence and pro-reintegration factions in Taiwan, and such, echoes the sorts of issues that I have witnessed firsthand in Montreal, where sign texts are important subjects of political and social discourse.

These questions, then, cannot be fully separated from issues of language ideology – how particular languages, dialects, and utterances are conceptualized and evaluated (positively or negatively) both by individuals and by institutions.  It will be very interesting to follow this story as the new changes come into effect.