Side Trip

Sign language

By DOUG LANSKY
Published August 14, 2005

[Photos courtesy of www.signspotting.com

Jaipur, India

	San Diego
	Angkor Wat, Cambodia
	Olympic Pennisula, Wash.
	Japan

When you visit a new country, you're not allowed to vote. You can't cash a personal check. Your library card isn't valid. Yet they let you drive.

Somehow we're expected to navigate the road and pick up the traffic nuances all before we make our first lane change. If that isn't demanding enough, there are the signs to contend with.

Fortunately for all of us, a few daring drivers were able to find a place to pull over, get out and snap a picture. Some of their photos are shown here.

If you're wondering how so many of these funny public postings came about, here's one partial explanation: There are 406-million native English speakers in the world. But that's less than 10 percent of the world's population. Yet, thanks to American, Canadian, Australian, British, Irish and New Zealand lingual stubbornness and an appetite for travel, the world has adopted English as the almost-official tourist language.

Mastering proper English, even for the most educated Anglo, is no easy task. So, it comes as little surprise that non-native English speakers who aren't tuned in to the subtleties of English get things delightfully twisted despite their best efforts to cater to us by putting up signs. (Even native English speakers produce some unintentionally humorous signage.)

Before laughing, consider for a moment who among us would have the courage to put up a sign in a foreign language. Just imagine the hilarity if we tried to cover our English-speaking lands with signs for Russian, Turkish or Chinese tourists.

Do you think we'd take the time to crosscheck spellings, grammar and possible double-entendres in even a small percentage of the world's roughly 6,800 known languages (2,261 of which have writing systems)?

Travel writer Doug Lansky, author of "First-Time Europe and Last Trout in Venice," lives in Sweden.

Submit digital sign photos to Doug Lansky at www.signspotting.com Instructions are included there on how to send photos by mail, too. Weekly winners receive $50. Lansky's Signspotting: Absurd and Amusing Signs from Around the World will be published this fall by Lonely Planet.

[Last modified August 12, 2005, 09:25:04]