Why is language symbolic

An example is the Chinese spoken dialect and written form called nushu. It apparently was known and used only by women in the village of Jiang-yong in Hunan Province of South China. Women taught nushu only to their daughters and used it to write memoirs, create songs, and share their thoughts with each other.

While women also knew and used the conventional Chinese dialect of their region, they used nushu to maintain female support networks in their male dominated society. Nushu is essentially gone now due to its suppression during the 's and 's by the communist government of China. The last speaker and writer of nushu was a woman named Yang Huanyi.

She died in Not all societies have distinct dialects. They are far more common in large-scale diverse societies than in small-scale homogenous ones. Over the last few centuries, deaf people have developed sign languages that are complex visual-gestural forms of communicating with each other.

Since they are effective communication systems with standardized rules, they also must be considered languages in their own right even though they are not spoken. Women in Papua New Guinea conversing in Pidgin English A pidgin is a simplified, makeshift language that develops to fulfill the communication needs of people who have no language in common but who need to occasionally interact for commercial and other reasons.

Pidgins combine a limited amount of the vocabulary and grammar of the different languages. People who use pidgin languages also speak their own native language. Over the last several centuries, dozens of pidgin languages developed as Europeans expanded out into the rest of the world for colonization and trade. The most well known one is Pidgin English in New Guinea. At times, a pidgin language becomes the mother tongue of a population. When that happens, it is called a creole language.

As pidgins change into creoles over several generations, their vocabularies enlarge. As physical objects, they belong to material culture, but because they function as symbols, they also convey nonmaterial cultural meanings. Some symbols are valuable only in what they represent. Trophies, blue ribbons, or gold medals, for example, serve no other purpose than to represent accomplishments.

But many objects have both material and nonmaterial symbolic value. The sight of an officer in uniform or a squad car triggers reassurance in some citizens, and annoyance, fear, or anger in others. Few people challenge or even think about stick figure signs on the doors of public bathrooms.

But those figures are more than just symbols that tell men and women which bathrooms to use. They also uphold the value, in the United States, that public restrooms should be gender exclusive.

Some road signs are universal. But how would you interpret the signage on the right? Symbols often get noticed when they are out of context. Used unconventionally, they convey strong messages. A stop sign on the door of a corporation makes a political statement, as does a camouflage military jacket worn in an antiwar protest.

Today, some college students have taken to wearing pajamas and bedroom slippers to class, clothing that was formerly associated only with privacy and bedtime. Though students might deny it, the outfit defies traditional cultural norms and makes a statement. Even the destruction of symbols is symbolic. Effigies representing public figures are burned to demonstrate anger at certain leaders.

In , crowds tore down the Berlin Wall, a decades-old symbol of the division between East and West Germany, communism, and capitalism. While different cultures have varying systems of symbols, one symbol is common to all: language. Language is a symbolic system through which people communicate and through which culture is transmitted.

Some languages contain a system of symbols used for written communication, while others rely on only spoken communication and nonverbal actions.

No one sign is meaningful by itself, but instead each sign accumulates meaning in terms of its similarities and differences to other signs. What is symbolism example? A red rose, or the color red, stands for love or romance. Black is a symbol that represents evil or death. A ladder may stand as a symbol for a connection between heaven and earth. A broken mirror may symbolize separation. What is meant by symbolic nature of language?

Language is a symbolic system through which people communicate and through which culture is transmitted. Some languages contain a system of symbols used for written communication, while others rely on only spoken communication and nonverbal actions.

What does this symbol mean? Which language is also called symbolic language? Some programming languages such as Lisp and Mathematica make it easy to represent higher-level abstractions as expressions in the language, enabling symbolic programming. What role do symbols play in a text?

Symbolism is used when one thing is meant to represent something else. Symbolism helps create meaning and emotion in a story. We could write tomes on the meaning of the cross today and throughout history. It will mean different things in different cultures. They can be used with other symbols to make statements as. Because cave paintings used pictograph symbols we can sometimes understand their intentions today and they communicate ideas to us.

Other more complex symbols that represented words in dead languages can elude us and the ones we can decode can lose their meaning in translation. Mathematic symbols that represent numbers are typically easier to backward engineer as they have a logical rational rather than an invented one like the Modern English language. Symbols are powerful and they hold weight. All the above symbols have weight and each tells a story. More than the meaning of pictographic symbols, words and phrases differ from culture to culture.

Some society will interpret the meaning of a phrase or word differently; others will have to translate to the best corresponding words or phrases in their culture. Some cultures have words for concepts that other cultures struggle to even describe. Assume I am speaking to someone who speaks my version of English.

If I say it in a nice and loving way the reaction will likely be positive. With a simple phrase, I have implied a morality and have judged. We can pair words and phrases to invoke even deeper meaning. As cultures changes, year-to-year or culture-to-culture, words become loaded with meaning.

The basic symbol of a word or phrase may be able to be defined by a dictionary, but the true meanings of words and symbols are in a state of infinite growth and can be so ethereal they are hard to pin down. We use images, paintings, sculptures, music, body language, dance, and more to convey meaning.

Lighting can convey meaning. Tone, context, and the absence of words silence can all convey meaning as well. From here, it is simply a matter of using your imagination to think about the different ways in which language works as a symbolic system. Language and communication go far beyond the basic dictionary definitions of words. Symbology is at the heart of all communication. Our brains are much more complex than our language, so we rely on concise symbols to carry complex meaning.

The way we weave the symbols together, along with factors like intention and context, help to convey ideas, concepts, and emotions.

Fact Myth. What we say with male-biased symbols and names is hardly ever fully understood. People take symbols developed centuries ago at face-value, i. Well I agree, these symbols are important. Still, if we look at the symbols of the Tao, astrology, mythology, and things like that equal weight tends to be given to the male and female.

They are considered equal parts of a whole. Ideally take that view on the sexes in America today too.