Category: Literacy and writing

Doorworks 2: Columna rostrata

Elogium of Gaius Duilius, Rome, Pal. dei Cons, CIL 12.125, 6.1300

The Columna rostrata was originally erected in Rome in 260 BC, commemorating the naval victory of the Roman consul Gaius Duilius over the Carthaginian fleet. The inscription boasted that over two million aes of loot were plundered. Rather than expressing the amount in numeral words, it was written using at least 22 (and possibly as many as 32 – the inscription is fragmentary) repeated Roman numeral signs for 100,000, seen towards the bottom of the inscription. The effect of this ‘conspicuous computation’ was to impress the reader with the vastness of the quantity, serving as an indexical sign of Rome’s military might.

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:

—

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’.

Signs of the times: a winner

Congratulations to Katherine Tong for correctly figuring out the answer to the puzzling inscription from yesterday’s post.

As you will recall the inscription was as follows:

This very perplexing because the final letters of StatE and UniversitY are enlarged, but not the final letter of WaynE.  As Katherine correctly points out, this is because on various places in the Wayne State website, as well as letterhead, and other inscriptions around campus, the words are arranged as follows:

with the words in two lines.  To only enlarge the W, S, and U would look unbalanced in this context, because the leftmost W and U would both be enlarged, giving it a definite leftward skew, so the final letters of ‘state’ and ‘university’ are also enlarged.  The final E in Wayne is not treated this way, however, because it falls in the middle of the line.    As Katherine points out, if this inscription intended for two lines (or one originally on two lines – there’s no way to tell) were put on a single line, the result would be the incongruous one seen in the puzzle.

It’s worth noting, though, that the U and Y in UniversitY are lowered, not raised as in the first inscription; it wouldn’t make any sense at all to lower the U and Y in an inscription where there is only one line – in fact, it requires there to be a constant typographic baseline.  When there are two lines, having a constant baseline wouldn’t make any sense because then the raised U and Y would create a gap between the baseline of the top row and the mean line of ‘niversit’.   This makes me suspect that someone just said to the people in facilities, ‘Give me a set of Wayne State University letters’ and then received the letters (with the enlarged W, S, E, U, and Y) but then, when actually laying the letters out on a single line, just put them in the way that made the most sense.

There is a third letter pattern seen around campus, which is the ‘correct’ single-line layout, with a fixed baseline and only the initial letters enlarged/raised:

Here, one could raise the last letter of UniversitY, but there is no great incentive to do so; in the second image above, both the W and U were on the left, and thus cognitively demanded some balancing, but here, the raised W, S, and U are relatively evenly spaced throughout the single line.

Issues such as these are of constant concern in the fields of typography and graphic design,  but in the anthropological and archaeological study of writing systems, and indeed in classical epigraphy, they are almost completely ignored, which I think is a serious mistake.   Epigraphy can tell us a lot about the aesthetic interests of a society, and the way in which certain principles are emphasized is not just a casual choice, but reflects decisions made for understandable reasons – some meaning-bearing (semantic), but others reflecting aspects of script far removed from the direct graphic communication of meaning.

Liz Throop, a professional graphic designer / design instructor, has discussed the cognitive and aesthetic shifts required when integrating the Western numerals into early European printing technology (Throop 2004).  This is a topic that I will be expanding upon at the International Medieval Congress next spring at an AVISTA session run by my colleague Shana Worthen.    Similarly, my colleague John Bodel at Brown, who is a Roman epigrapher, introduced me to his concept of ‘paragram’: signs and graphic conventions that normally stand outside writing systems as conventionally conceived and yet which play a crucial role in shaping how we understand and read texts.  Thinking about these sorts of quasi-aesthetic decisions has forced me to go beyond the question ‘What is the set of valid signs in X script/numerical system?’ and to think about the way that graphemes are designed, combined, arranged, and modified for various purposes in various contexts.

I should add that it may not be a coincidence that Katherine, who was one of my honours thesis students last year, and has now moved on to bigger and better things at the University of Toronto, was the first to correctly determine the explanation.  While she is not exactly a ‘ringer’ in this contest, she is the author of a truly exceptional paper, and certainly the most bizarrely titled: “THE MR MAROR TO BE JOLLY LA LA LA LA LA: An investigation of writing (and gibberish) on Dollarware” (Tong 2008), which is part of The Dollarware Project.  It is an analysis of the aesthetic, semantic, and just plain bizarre text found on discount ceramic mugs, and is (if I may say so) better than her thesis, and seriously in need of a peer-reviewed publication venue.

Katherine will be claiming her prize shortly, the privilege of choosing the topic of an upcoming post here at Glossographia.  Congratulations!

Works cited

Throop, Liz. 2004. Thinking on paper: Hindu-Arabic numerals in European typography. Visible Language 38(3): 290-303.

Tong, Katherine. 2008. THE MR MAROR TO BE JOLLY LA LA LA LA LA: An investigation of writing (and gibberish) on Dollarware. Dollarware Project, report 17.  http://dollarware.org/report17.pdf.

Signs of the times: a contest

Here’s a bit of a puzzler for you:  Identify what is wrong with this inscription found at my place of employment, and then explain why it is the way it is.

There isn’t a big cash prize for the winner, but I tell you what: the first correct respondent will get to decide the topic for an upcoming post at Glossographia.

Edit: Everyone has picked up on the inconsistency; the last letter of Wayne is not capitalized but StatE and UniversitY are.  However, no one has yet correctly discerned the explanation, so the contest continues!