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In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Dr. Ludwik Łazarz Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist from Bialystok, now part of Poland but at the time in the Russian Empire, developed a new language that he called "esperanto", which literally means "one who hopes", literally hoping that it would help pull down the linguistic barriers across the world, making it possible for anyone in any country to communicate with any other inhabitant of the planet. Some years have passed since then and, while esperanto is still alive and almost one million people speak it worldwide, another language has become the "esperanto" de facto: English. One thing is clear: with a certain knowledge of English you'll able to get by in most countries, or at least find somebody who speaks it and can assist you even in the remotest of all corners in the world. That, of course, has its consequences. You can't expect every time an excellent level of English in non-native countries. And that too becomes apparent in the design of public signs directed to tourists or visitors. In some cases and places the linguistic irregularities are so frequent that they end up creating an specific gender of pseudo-English with its own characteristics and designation: Spanglish, Engrish, Chinglish, etc. In this page we present you just a sample of those signs that we can put into the category of failed English. One of the main contributor is China, a country that has been rapidly growing and opening to the outside world in recent years. As you'll see, these signs can be pretty amusing, naturally without aspiring to be so... We'll be regularly adding new ones, so check back as often as you can.
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