Introduction to Semiotic Understanding: Semi-what?

Semiotics The study of signs, their meanings, and how they affect the social world How we interpret the messages that we receive through the world

Early Signs: petroglyphs

Early Signs: Sumer Tokens 8000bce

Early Signs: Pictographic Writing Middle East Africa/Egypt

Early Signs: Mayan Calendar 3372bce

Early Signs: Hieroglyphics petroglyph? pecked picture hieroglyph? planned story

Early Signs: Egypt Hieratic Writing 2600bce

More Early Signs papyrus used 2060 code of law written 2000 Gilgamesh first written legend 1700 Hammurabi written on stone

Alphabet? 1700 bce in Canaan 1300 cuneiform symbols 1200 Phoenician (no vowels) 1000 writing used in Near East 900 spreads to continent 800 Greeks add vowels 150 Hebrew alphabet

The Rosetta Stone 196 bce multilingual stone hieroglyphs hieratic script Greek decree of Ptolemy

Theory 1: Ferdinand de Saussure Late 1800’s Swiss theorist Recognized the connection between the form a sign takes and the concept that it represents

Signified/Signifier Signified Signifier Concept Form

PEACE

A bit more complicated…

Theory 2: Charles Sanders Peirce Late 1800’s American Believed people were important to understanding signs

According to Peirce, meaning comes from... representamen: the form a sign takes interpretant: not interpreter, but the sense made of the sign (the sign in the mind of the interpreter) object: the thing to which the sign belongs

Sense Referent: what it stands for Sign Vehicle

Sign types (what's your sign?) symbolic: arbitrary. must be learned icon/iconic: resemble or imitated signified index: not arbitrary. directly connected so that it can be inferred

Symbolic:

Icon/Iconic

Index

your task: In pairs, you need to name an example of a symbolic, an iconic, and an index type.