Semiotics and Language: Understanding Signs and Communication
Seven Key Criteria for Assessing the Importance of Languages Globally
A) Degree with a Global Reach
This refers to languages with international reach. Many English speakers have a global, multilingual, and multicultural perspective (GML) that is almost universal in the education field.
B) Production of Textual Languages
Languages produce oral and written texts, some of which transcend and become part of the cultural heritage of the users of the language in which they are written. These texts have cultural value, including most scientific and literary texts. Regarding the production of scientific texts, English absolutely succeeds in today’s world. However, in terms of literary production, English shares the top spot with many other languages.
Eight Criteria for Clarifying Language
A) Field of Perceptual or Sensory Nature Signs
B) Degree of Encryption
- First-degree or primary languages construct their signs from reality.
- Second-degree languages are generated by their signs from an existing language and re-encrypt them from their units. Writing is a second-degree language.
C) Articulated and Unarticulated Signs
A sign, to be one, has to be meaningful.
- There are languages whose signs are non-significant, only distinctive. In semiology, these are called figures.
- There also exist languages whose signs are compact and unanalyzable, such as sign language.
D) Unproductive or Productive Languages
- Unproductive languages: Those in which it is not possible to match elements in the code. For many semiologists, these languages permit communication, but not without limits. They are codes that allow for very simple messages.
- Productive languages: Start from a code that is also limited. They include a number of signs, and additionally, a number of combination rules, which create, without limits, all the messages that are desired.
Nine: What is Semiotics or Semiology?
It is the science that studies signs and their functioning in the social life of peoples. Although it is not a true science with a specific object of study, it is a wide field of studies on very different objects whose only affinity is communication.
Ten: Are So-Called “Natural Signs” True Signs?
Natural signs are not true signs. They are only signs or symptoms, including a natural nexus that we know from experience exists between causes and effects. There is no intention to communicate, and no convention has been socialized.
Eleven: Is a Man with Bloodstained Hands a Sign?
No, because the man has no intention of communicating that he has killed someone.
Twelve: Differences Between the Process of Written Communication and the Speech Circuit
The psychological facts in writing link three elements (concept, graphic image, and sound), not two as in the speech circuit (acoustic image and concept). As for the physiological facts, in writing, hand mobilization is supervised by sight. These are very different from speech and hearing in the speech circuit.
Thirteen: Difficulties of Writing
The greatest difficulty in writing is given by its physical nature. Being a derivative, a second-degree language, we need to ask before the primary language that has given rise. To learn to read and write, we first have to achieve a development of spoken language. Also, at the time of writing, we always use spoken language as a mediator, since the acoustic image is essential to read and write.