Semiotics is a subject which I am interested in and looked at during my degree, but I know that I never fully understood it so I am now taking another look in the hope that it makes a bit more sense.
I'm looking at a book called Structuralism and Semiotics.
The book examines the use of language, and how language fundamentally affects the way we think and behave. An example of this might be, when two people from different regions or countries say the same thing and what they say is varied by an accent, language or by the intonations in speech. The 'changes' may be subtle, but distinct enough to carry colloquialisms (or systems of information) which effectively set apart the language from a neighbouring district so-on. This difference is what gives us identity (within language eg. gaelic, or welsh) and therefore individuality. We also find that these meanings can be 'lost in translation', the result of this clearly changes the meaning of the sentence, not unlike that of Chinese whispers.
"..There is therefore, concluded Sapir in a classical statement no such thing as an objective, unchanging 'real world':
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the real world is to a large extent built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different label attached....We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality, p162) "
Liinguistics and Anthropology pg 31.Terence Hawkes, 'Structuralism and Semiotics'
