Semiotics: The Study of Signs
- Alia
- May 24, 2019
- 1 min read
I found this week's lecture very informative as I have never learned anything about semiotics on a more deeper note before. I've only learned about hieroglyphics and pictograms but not much on anything else. Had no idea there were three categories, I thought that they all generally meant the same thing (icon & symbol). Something that I found slightly harder to understand was index. Besides the examples for gender (shoe and heel) I think it might take be a bit longer to think of other examples.
Overall I had quite an experience thinking of different symbols for everything. It was quite easy in the beginning but once I started running out of ideas I found it harder to think of things. Personally I don't think that I categorised them properly 😅 and that some of them are a bit too obvious but I think I did an okay job at doing so.
the 3 words (icon, index and symbol) only carries those meanings in the study of semiotics, so in English i would say that icon and symbol are still used interchangeably. Yes, I agree, index is the tougher nut to crack for me. I think the keyword is implies and evidence personally. The common examples are smoke, implies fire, cat footprint implies a cat, a petal of rose falling down implies a rose. Visually it doesn't resemble the actual concept its signifying, but it implies that concept. On the categorising - don't worry if you feel like you can'y put the signs nicely into each categories. Sometimes a sign can both be at the same time Iconic and/or Indexical and/or Symbolic.…