Used Book Store Signage (SPOILER ALERT)

I visited a certain used book store near Eastern Market today and was entertained by its ample signage. Here are some examples of the signs posted throughout the store:

The entrance to the store. One sign instructs patrons to leave all bags/packages at the front desk, two signs specify the limited hours in which certain transactions can be made, and two other signs tell patrons not to use their cell phones inside (click the image to make it larger).

Apparently poetry readers aren't very good about keeping books in alphabetical order.

SPOILER ALERT?

An intimidating sign wishes patrons farewell as they descend the stairs.

Upside-Down Fortune (Chinese New Year)

Happy Chinese New Year! A red paper lantern bears the character 福 (fu = "good luck, fortune") upside-down. This is a common practice in Chinese restaurants and storefronts around the start of the lunar new year, as "fu dao le" (meaning "fu is upside-down") sounds like 福到了 (fu dao le = "luck/fortune has arrived").

For a (rather unfortunate) 福-related image in Chinatown, see this posting.

Jaded Hearts

Happy Singles Awareness Day! Chinatown/Gallery Place Metro, Feb 14, 2010.

Unfortunate Name Placement

Very unfortunate name placement in Chinatown.

P.S. For those who might not know, the decorative square motif below is a stylized version of the character 福 (meaning "good luck, fortune") - hence the title for this blog posting.

P.P.S. For another image involving 福, see this posting.

Snowmageddon 2010

This weekend's huge blizzard (aka "Snowmageddon") has turned this town topsy-turvy.

Since this is a blog about linguistic matters: some media outlets have attributed the widely-used name for this meteorological event to a semi-ironic comment by Obama, but the term "Snowmageddon" (or related terms like "Snowpocalypse 2.0" etc.) were in use in local media - and the blogopshere - for quite some time prior to his usage.

P.S. For more on the Greek/Hebrew origin of the word "Armageddon" itself, see here.

Mixed Messages

Capitol Hill, January 2010. There are certain magical spaces within the realm of DC where parking is both permitted and forbidden at the same time.

Eastern Market, February 2010. Another case of mixed messages - go pay for your inability to park!

Multilingual Map: Territorial Waters?

One last detail of this multilingual map. Here we see Florida and the Bahamas (with place-names in English, since the US and UK lay claim to these lands respectively) and Cuba's place-names are in Spanish. When it comes to the sea, English is used right up to the north coast of Cuba; everything south of Cuba is in Spanish.

The use of English or Spanish demarcates different parts of the sea, conceptually it dividing this contiguous body of water into distinct cultural/linguistic zones. The tidy distinction does break down, though; for instance, Jamaica's territory bears English place-names yet the water immediately around the island (presumably within Jamaica's jurisdiction) bears Spanish text. As a whole, the map really visualizes (for me) how arbitrary and paradoxical the notion of "territorial waters" is in the first place. In order to define "territorial water," one must first conceive of water as if it were land (Latin etymology: terra = earth, land).

For more on this map, see here and here.

Multilingual Map: Language and Territory

Another detail of an intriguing multilingual map. All the place-names on this map are written in the official language of the nation-state that lays claim to that land. I'm intrigued here by what happens to the sea. Could the Spanish-language "Golfo de México" imply that this entire body of water "belongs" to Mexico? I would assume that the US (or individual coastal states) must lay claim to jurisdiction over some of the part of the sea before it becomes "international waters" but I'm no expert in maritime law...

For more on this map, see here and here.

Multilingual Caribbean Map: Language and Place

This detail of a multilingual map (in the building where I work) shows two locations very much in the news: Cuba and Haiti. On the left, note "Guantánamo" (with diacritical mark over the A, since all of the Cuban place-names are rendered in Spanish). On the right, HAÏTI (with marks over the I, since all the Haitian place-names are in French). Curiously, the water "in between" these lands is marked neither in Spanish nor French. Instead, it gets an English name: "Windward Passage."

Not quite sure how to interpret the use of English for this particular body of water, but the map as a whole has an interesting way of visualizing the relationship between language and place.

For a larger view of the Caribbean Sea and (here designated in Spanish as "Mar Caribe"), click below.

For more on this map, see here and here.

Taiwan Consulate Visit

For a variety of complex reasons, Taiwan does not have an official "embassy" in DC; instead, there's something called the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO). Today, I visited the Consulate Division today to do some business. Above, the entrance sign (note the American U. sign reflection in the background) - don't really have much to say other than I think this image looks cool.

A little bit about languages on US and Taiwan passports. It used to be the case that only English and French (for a long time the international language of diplomacy) were used on US passports, but a Bill Clinton-era decision added Spanish to the mix. The Taiwan passport uses Chinese and the the more recent global "lingua franca," English.

Here's a selection of the various US- and Taiwan-based publications in the waiting area (some in English, some bilingual, and Mandarin Chinese only).

One fun thing about Taiwanese visual media (newspapers, TV) is that a reader/viewer may be forced to scan text in many directions simultaneously; here, the text on left was in motion scrolling "up" (i.e., to be read from up to down); at bottom, static yellow test reads left to right, and the white text below was in motion scrolling right to left. Meanwhile, Arabic numerals and Roman letters read left to right.

One last item of interest on the wall: a poster bearing a poem about city life in Taipei (originally written in Chinese) is rendered into German and English translations, each by a local translator. As far as I could tell, the translations were perfectly fine (the poem itself didn't strike me as too complex).