Sunday, July 12, 2020

Stop, scratch your head and wonder what to do

What exactly does this sign say?
Surely a sign like this could only appear on an Irish road?

But it's brilliant. And to add to its brilliance, the road it is on is tiny,

Allowing a vehicle to travel on this road at 80 km/h is insane.

On the one hand it is giving permission to travel at 80 km/h and on the other hand, telling the driver to drive slowly.

And surely the Irish must be off-putting to the non-Irish speaker: where are they being told to 'go'?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Irish on signs is always in italics to distinguish it from English.

Anonymous said...

From Wikipedia: Directional signage in the Republic of Ireland is fairly similar to the United Kingdom design. All Irish text is in italic print, in lower case lettering with initial letters in capitals. Irish script is inclined at 15 degrees to the vertical. The Irish text is placed above the corresponding English. All English text is in upper case Roman alphabet. The Transport Heavy and Motorway typefaces are used, although the Irish language text uses a distinctive oblique variant, in which letters a are represented by script a (ɑ), and letters i are represented by dotless i (ı) in order better to differentiate them from their accented forms (However, sometimes normal letter i is used). Only the Irish place name is shown if the sign is in the Gaeltacht, or the official name in English is identical to the Irish name or nearly so (for example Dún Laoghaire or Port Laoise). Due to the practice of signposting in both languages, usually a limited number of destinations will be signposted. If a destination can be reached by following a route which is a spur from that route, the destination and route number will be shown in brackets. Also, distances are shown in kilometres.

Michael Commane said...

Ah, that too has always confused me. Surely it is the foreign language that should be in italics?
And why the anonymity?
Delighted you read the blog and thank you for your comment.

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