Symbols

“A symbol is something such as an object, picture, written word, sound, or particular mark that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention.”


From the above definition, we can simply say that a symbol is something that represents something else . It tends to be the result of convention among the members of society. The important point to understand the concept of symbol is that a conventional relationship must exist between the symbol and its interpretation. In the history of human kind, we know symbol was first introduced by Ancient Egyptian. They used hieroglyphs as their written language which were in the form of symbols, In the linguistic field they are commonly called  pictogram (picture-writing). Take a look these below examples:

From the above example, we can see that there is a direct connection between the symbols and their representations. The Egyptian directly adopted the nature phenomena into the abstract drawing which had been agreed by the members of the society. More abstract form from a symbol is called logograms, it will be discussed in the next section.

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See also:

• Symbols
• Pictograms
• Logograms
• Syllabic Writing
• Alphabetic Writing