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...

2200 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.