Road signs and Irish Language

The first type of N-road sign we got with km on it (late 70s) was definitely a darker green. Not really recent though...

You keep saying “brighter”, but that’s not the difference. The signage in Ireland is generally a different hue, not a paler shade. Also, it really depends on what you mean by “the UK”. Where are you referring to specifically? I posted a link to the “standard” previously. There is no such thing as a “standard colour” for UK (or Irish) signage, just a range of acceptable colours, and there is variation across the UK.

The type of reflective materials used for signage has changed several times in the last few decades, with the newer types being much more reflective. You can see this where signs have been patched. (I posted an advance direction sign for Hangar Lane in London a few pages ago where this is clearly visible).

@Hotblack Desiato the very first signs used a kind of reflective paint - there are very few of these left in Ireland, but you can find the odd survivor in small towns. Later signs used a prismatic material, which reflects more light. This is what makes them appear brighter. Those materials have continued to be developed over the years, and signs erected in the last 10 years are noticeably more reflective than earlier ones.

You’ll note it’s always someone else’s confusion that they’re worried about...

In fairness, this thread wasn’t about being confused by Irish on signs, but rather as a suggestion on how to accommodate both languages on a sign without the result being as ugly as it is at present. It got hijacked a couple of times, but we’ve managed to avoid the dark pit of language politics.

I’ve taken wrong turns, but never because I couldn’t determine what the place was from a sign-board. I’ve also taken wrong turns in countries with monolingual signage: off the top of my head, places where I’ve made wrong turns include Italy, Germany, Czech Republic, France, UK and the United States, and except for Czech, in each of those I also had a enough of the local language to be able to read directions like “KEEP RIGHT” or “NEXT EXIT”. If you were to ask me the main reason for missing a turn, I’d say the most common cause was that the placement of the sign was misleading with regard to where the required turn actually was: the USA is particularly bad in this, as they don’t use “fingerpost” signs on junctions very consistently (or at all sometimes) to confirm that you’re going the way you think you are.

But again, arguing on behalf of some unidentified yet incapable person is the hallmark of a weak argument. In all the years we’ve had accidents on the road, if just one driver had ever told the press “I was confused by the two names on the sign” we would have heard about it, don’t you think? Especially given the antipathy toward the Irish language in large parts of the Irish population.

It’s a non-issue. The bigger problem with Irish road signage is the occasional inconsistency of the designs, and the fact that in some locations, there’s too much of it to take in at once.

The Republic has a very confused bilingual policy in general.

Our road signage standards are a reflection of that.

There has been a change of materials, though. Two at least over the last thirty years. You can clearly see it where old signage has been patched in the UK: the new material is more reflective and thus appears brighter, even in daylight. Our major-route signage is still all too young for there to be much evidence of this, but the UK has an older stock, and so has more chance of repairs. If you drive at night, this becomes extremely obvious.

It is the hue of our signs that is different, it’s more towards cyan than the UK’s more yellow hue. But that’s nothing to do with the reflectivity of the signs themselves. Incidentally, the shade of yellow we use here is also different: the UK uses a “warmer” (more orange) tone, we use a “cooler” (more green) tone. If we used the same shade of yellow as the UK on our bluer signs, it would create a slight strobing effect.

Our motorway signage uses a very slightly more saturated blue colour than the UK’s, but the hue is much closer than with the green boards. The ISO colour spec for blue signs is much tighter than that for green, so there’s less permitted variation anyway.

On these two random samples (M1 Louth, M45 Birmingham), the HSL colour picked off the photo gives a Hue reading of 220 and 221 degrees. That’s a negligible difference: ambient light and time of day would account for a bigger variation.

This is no longer in the Traffic Signs Manual, thankfully. At first, these used to say “An Lár TOWN CENTRE”, then that changed to “Áitainm TOWN CENTRE” (name of place in Irish), but now it’s just “Áitainm PLACE NAME”, with both present.

Of course, the problem with the new system is that for bigger towns, there’s now no clear direction that shows you the way to the actual centre.

Italy’s signage system uses a bullseye symbol that indicates the way to centre of the named town: it would be a nice thing to adopt here, I think.

(The brown/yellow signs are

Not American at all - the inspiration is more obviously the German “Spielstraße” sign (which I’ve seen erected here by councils in one or two places):

That used to be only used for residential streets with high chances of children playing (hence “Spielstraße”), but now officially it is used for any area where the road is shared by cars and pedestrians.

When first introduced in Germany, these had a supplementary plate underneath that read “Spielstraße” (there was one near to where I lived a long time ago), but years later, it’s sufficient to just mount the main pictogram sign without description. I suspect these will go the same way here over time. After all, I remember seeing “Roundabout Ahead”, “Signalised Roundabout Ahead” plates on signs a long time ago, but they’re completely absent these days - once people know what the symbols mean, there’s no need for the additional plate.

We do, but only for new concepts. Then we revert to symbol-only signage. Like I said, I can’t remember when I last saw a “roundabout ahead” sign plate, but there was a time that they were affixed to lots of roundabout signs. Now, there’s just the symbol with no explanation needed.

The way we do it is normal in other countries too. When a sign design (or the traffic control it represents) is new, its meaning is usually spelled out too. After a few years, there’s no need to do that anymore.

The difference with the American system is that with ours, the text is present to aid comprehension, whereas in American signs, there is only the text. For example, this “design”:

However, you might be surprised to see that this is also part of the same system:

... and note the supplementary plate describing the sign. The explanation for this is that the Federal Highways Agency knows that English-only signs are a safety problem, and has actually been sneaking toward using pictorial signs, but like just everything in that country, adopting ideas from other places runs the risk of some oddball Senator, usually a Republican, vindictively killing your budget for being “unAmerican”.

That’s not exactly what I was talking about. The idea (if there even was one) was that there a lots of places whose Irish name and English name are so similar when written down that someone with zero knowledge of Irish could recognise the place just by trying to pronounce the Irish name as if it was in their own language. In such cases, you could get away with only putting the Irish one on the signboard, and it would make the signs clearer.

“Baile Munna”, “Doire”, ”Fionnghlas” all fall into that category, but I’d argue that names that use an articles in Irish, like “An Chill” and “An Nás” are too much of a leap, and so would need their English version too. (an aside, I’ve never liked the use of “an Nás” for Naas. “Nás na Ríogh” always seemed to be more popular within the town itself, and the use of the definite article always seemed odd).

.. but “Baile Eoin” there is an example of what not to do. This absolutely needs dual-naming, because there’s no phonetic hint at all. The only way you can figure out that this is a direction to the place known in English as “JOHNSTOWN” is if you know that “Baile” is the Irish for “town”, “Eoin” is the Irish form of the English name “John” and that the word order indicates the genitive case (i.e. "TOWN of JOHN").

“Béal Feirste” also fits the “phonetic enough” pattern, but it should stay in English, because it’s a destination outside of the state. Many countries keep foreign destinations in their native language as a courtesy to travellers who will also be following signage in another countries to get to their destination.

For example, on this sign from Italy, “Nizza” and “Nice” are the same place. (Oh, and Genova here is the Italian city that we call Genoa, not an Italian spelling of Geneva, which would be “Ginevra”).

... and this Austrian motorway sign goes further. German-speakers would know the capital of the Czech Republic as “Prag”, but “Praha” is what the Czechs call it. The logic behind this one is that once you cross the border, only “Praha” will appear on signs within CZ, so it’s good to get used to it now...

Of course, destinations within a country are subject to no such courtesies, and in the case of Belgium, local signage can be outright hostile to visitors, as the choice of whether LIEGE/LUIK, MALINES/MECHELEN, ANVERS/ANTWERPEN or MONS/BERGEN are on the sign depends on where you are...

Yep, I'll admit the bottom sign was a bit of stretch. I thought the same thing about "Baile Eoin" and "Béal Feirste".

As I said:

I was just throwing something out there, not something I could ever see happening within the foreseeable future. Just showing how clear signs could be.

Placenames are not instructions - you don’t have to understand their meaning; you just have to recognise them. Do you need to know what the name “Praha” means, or just that if you keep following the signs that say that, you’ll arrive at the capital of the Czech Republic?

To be clear, though, I'm not advocating replacing all the current all Anglicized names on Irish roadsigns with their Irish originals. It was just a throwaway remark that, in many cases, the Anglicized versions of placenames are so close to the original Irish names that having both present is a kind of clutter. If we’ve survived without needing to see "DUNLEARY" on signage, why do we need "BALLYMUN" and "Baile Munna", which are much closer?

Lets be honest - we’re not that famous: most people from outside Ireland would maybe be able to offer Dublin and Kerry as place-names, and that’s about it. As long as what's on the sign-boards can be linked to what people call the place, it's fine.

Ireland is predominantly an English-speaking country, but most of our place-names aren’t. Instead, they’re a 19th century attempt to phonetically spell Irish, and as a result the spelling of a fair amount of of the Anglicized names are not really that helpful in pronouncing them: Sometimes, good intentions go astray, like “Naas” which is trying to capture an a-fada by doubling the vowel, and maybe if pronounced as written it would be much closer to “Nás” than the way people actually pronounce it (“Nayce”); “Youghal” is trying to compromise between “Yawl” and “Eochaill” and ends up confusing everyone. And does the spelling of “Drogheda” really help anyone?

Then there are ones that we’re just used to, so we don’t notice. You might be surprised to know that Thurles often appears on a lot of lists of “hard Irish place-names”. It think the problem is that because it has only one s at the end, it gets prounounced as a single syllable (as if it were the plural of something called a “Thurle”), but by contrast the Irish name, Durlas is much easier to pronounce right.

Again, to be clear, there's no chance of changing these names - names are very sticky, and once they take hold, they need to have a really unpopular association to unstick (notice how Kingstown, Queenstown and Queens County all changed their names so completely that at least one person reading this would have to look up their new names)