Pictogram

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A pictographic traffic sign (top) warning motorists of horses and riders Road-sign-horse.jpg
A pictographic traffic sign (top) warning motorists of horses and riders

A pictogram (also pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto [1] ) is a graphical symbol that conveys meaning through its visual resemblance to a physical object. Pictograms are used in systems of writing and visual communication. A pictography is a writing system [2] which uses pictograms. Some pictograms, such as hazard pictograms, may be elements of formal languages.

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In the field of prehistoric art, the term "pictograph" has a different definition, and specifically refers to art painted on rock surfaces. Pictographs are contrasted with petroglyphs, which are carved or incised.

Historical

Ojibwa pictographs on cliff-face at Agawa Rock, Lake Superior Provincial Park of a boat and Mishipeshu, an animal with horns, painted with red ochre Agawa Rock, panel VIII.jpg
Ojibwa pictographs on cliff-face at Agawa Rock, Lake Superior Provincial Park of a boat and Mishipeshu, an animal with horns, painted with red ochre

Early written symbols were based on pictographs (pictures which resemble what they signify) and ideograms (symbols which represent ideas). Ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, and Chinese civilizations began to adapt such symbols to represent concepts, developing them into logographic writing systems. Pictographs are still in use as the main medium of written communication in some non-literate cultures in Africa, the Americas, and Oceania.[ citation needed ] Pictographs are often used as simple, pictorial, representational symbols by most contemporary cultures.

Several prehistoric engravings can be found around La Silla Observatory. Signatures from the Past.jpg
Several prehistoric engravings can be found around La Silla Observatory.

Pictographs can be considered an art form, or can be considered a written language and are designated as such in Pre-Columbian art, Native American art, Ancient Mesopotamia and Painting in the Americas before Colonization. [4] [5] One example of many is the Rock art of the Chumash people, part of the Native American history of California. In 2011, UNESCO's World Heritage List added "Petroglyph Complexes of the Mongolian Altai, Mongolia" [6] to celebrate the importance of the pictograms engraved in rocks.

Some scientists in the field of neuropsychiatry and neuropsychology, such as Mario Christian Meyer, are studying the symbolic meaning of indigenous pictograms and petroglyphs, [7] aiming to create new ways of communication between native people and modern scientists to safeguard and valorize their cultural diversity. [8]

Modern uses

An early modern example of the extensive use of pictographs may be seen in the map in the London suburban timetables of the London and North Eastern Railway, 1936–1947, designed by George Dow, in which a variety of pictographs was used to indicate facilities available at or near each station. Pictographs remain in common use today, serving as pictorial, representational signs, instructions, or statistical diagrams. Because of their graphical nature and fairly realistic style, they are widely used to indicate public toilets, or places such as airports and train stations. Because they are a concise way to communicate a concept to people who speak many different languages, pictograms have also been used extensively at the Olympics since the 1964 summer games in Tokyo featured designs by Masaru Katsumi. Later Olympic pictograms have been redesigned for each set of games. [9] [10] [11]

Pictographic writing as a modernist poetic technique is credited to Ezra Pound, though French surrealists credit the Pacific Northwest American Indians of Alaska who introduced writing, via totem poles, to North America. [12]

Contemporary artist Xu Bing created Book from the Ground, a universal language made up of pictograms collected from around the world. A Book from the Ground chat program has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally.

In mathematics

A compound pictogram showing the breakdown of the survivors and deaths of the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic by class and age/gender Titanic casualties.svg
A compound pictogram showing the breakdown of the survivors and deaths of the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic by class and age/gender

In statistics, pictograms are charts in which icons represent numbers to make it more interesting and easier to understand. A key is often included to indicate what each icon represents. All icons must be of the same size, but a fraction of an icon can be used to show the respective fraction of that amount. [13]

For example, the following table:

DayLetters sent
Monday10
Tuesday17
Wednesday29
Thursday41
Friday18

can be graphed as follows:

DayLetters sent
Monday Email Silk.svg
Tuesday Email Silk.svg   Image from the Silk icon theme by Mark James half left.svg
Wednesday Email Silk.svg   Email Silk.svg   Email Silk.svg
Thursday Email Silk.svg   Email Silk.svg   Email Silk.svg   Email Silk.svg
Friday Email Silk.svg   Email Silk.svg

Key: Email Silk.svg = 10 letters

As the values are rounded to the nearest 5 letters, the second icon on Tuesday is the left half of the original.

Standardization

Pictographs can often transcend languages in that they can communicate to speakers of a number of tongues and language families equally effectively, even if the languages and cultures are completely different. This is why road signs and similar pictographic material are often applied as global standards expected to be understood by nearly all.

A standard set of pictographs was defined in the international standard ISO 7001: Public Information Symbols. Other common sets of pictographs are the laundry symbols used on clothing tags and the chemical hazard symbols as standardized by the GHS system.

Pictograms have been popularized in use on the Internet and in software, better known as "icons" displayed on a computer screen in order to help user navigate a computer system or mobile device.

See also

Notes

  1. Gove, Philip Babcock. (1993). Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged. Merriam-Webster Inc. ISBN   0-87779-201-1.
  2. Goody, Jack (1987). The interface between the written and the oral. Cambridge. p. 4. ISBN   0-521-33268-0. OCLC   14242868.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  3. "Signatures from the Past". ESO.org. European Southern Observatory. 30 January 2017. Retrieved 30 January 2017.
  4. Pharo, Lars Kirkhusmo (2018). "Multilingualism and Lingua Francae of Indigenous Civilizations of America". In Braarvig, Jens; Geller, Markham J. (eds.). Studies in Multilingualism, Lingua Franca and Lingua Sacra. Edition Open Access Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. p. 488. ISBN   9783945561133.
  5. Ambrosino, Gordon (2018-10-20). "Painted origins: inscribed landscape histories in the Fortaleza pictograph style during the Andean, late pre-Hispanic period". World Archaeology. 50 (5): 804–819. doi:10.1080/00438243.2019.1612272. ISSN   0043-8243. S2CID   198820112.
  6. "Petroglyphic Complexes of the Mongolian Altai". WHC.UNESCO.org. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. 2011.
  7. Meyer, Mario Christian (December 1985). Apprentissage de la langue maternelle écrite: étude sur des populations "les moins favorisées" dans une approche interdisciplinaire (PDF). ED-85/WS/65.
  8. Meyer, Mario Christian. "Out Of The Forest & Into The Lab: Amerindian Initiation Into Sacred Science" (PDF). In Bloom, Pamela (ed.). Amazon Up Close. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-03-17.
  9. Hall, C. Justin; Allen, Zachary. "Olympic Pictograms". Visual Rhetoric.
  10. "Olympic Pictograms: Design through History". MediaMadeGreat.com. 16 August 2016.
  11. Popovic, John Jan (ed.). "Olympic Games Pictograms". 1stMuse.com.
  12. Reed 2003, p. xix
  13. "Understanding pictograms". BBC — Skillswise. Archived from the original on 2013-12-29. Retrieved 2014-05-11.

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An ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Logo</span> Graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition

A logo is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or to include the text of the name that it represents as in a wordmark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Petroglyph</span> Images carved on a rock surface as a form of rock art

A petroglyph is an image created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form of rock art. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images. Petroglyphs, estimated to be 20,000 years old are classified as protected monuments and have been added to the tentative list of UNESCO's World Heritage Sites. Petroglyphs are found worldwide, and are often associated with prehistoric peoples. The word comes from the Greek prefix petro-, from πέτρα petra meaning "stone", and γλύφω glýphō meaning "carve", and was originally coined in French as pétroglyphe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dongba symbols</span> Naxi pictographic writing system

The Dongba, Tomba or Tompa or Mo-so symbols are a system of pictographic glyphs used by the ²dto¹mba of the Naxi people in southern China. In the Naxi language it is called ²ss ³dgyu 'wood records' or ²lv ³dgyu 'stone records'. The first artifacts with this script on them originate from approximately 30 AD.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emoji</span> Symbols often used as emotional cues in text

An emoji is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation as well as to replace words as part of a logographic system. Emoji exist in various genres, including facial expressions, expressions, activity, food and drinks, celebrations, flags, objects, symbols, places, types of weather, animals and nature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miꞌkmaw hieroglyphic writing</span> Defunct writing system of Canadas Mikmaq First Nation

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All Chinese characters are logograms, but can be further categorised based on the manner of their creation or derivation. Some characters may be analysed structurally as compounds created from smaller components, while some are not decomposable in this way. A small number of characters originate as pictographs and ideograms, but the vast majority are what are often called phono-semantic compounds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visual language</span> System of communication using visual elements

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isotype (picture language)</span> Method of pictorial representation

Isotype is a method of showing social, technological, biological, and historical connections in pictorial form. It consists of a set of standardized and abstracted pictorial symbols to represent social-scientific data with specific guidelines on how to combine the identical figures using serial repetition. It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, due to its having been developed at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien between 1925 and 1934. The founding director of this museum, Otto Neurath, was the initiator and chief theorist of the Vienna Method. Gerd Arntz was the artist responsible for realising the graphics. The term Isotype was applied to the method around 1935, after its key practitioners were forced to leave Vienna by the rise of Austrian fascism.

The history of communication technologies have evolved in tandem with shifts in political and economic systems, and by extension, systems of power. Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange to full conversations and mass communication. The history of communication itself can be traced back since the origin of speech circa 100,000 BCE. The use of technology in communication may be considered since the first use of symbols about 30,000 years BCE. Among the symbols used, there are cave paintings, petroglyphs, pictograms and ideograms. Writing was a major innovation, as well as printing technology and, more recently, telecommunications and the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mixtec writing</span> Logographic writing system

Mixtec writing originated as a logographic writing system during the Post-Classic period in Mesoamerican history. Records of genealogy, historic events, and myths are found in the pre-Columbian Mixtec codices. The arrival of Europeans in 1520 AD caused changes in form, style, and the function of the Mixtec writings. Today these codices and other Mixtec writings are used as a source of ethnographic, linguistic, and historical information for scholars, and help to preserve the identity of the Mixtec people as migration and globalization introduce new cultural influences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coso Rock Art District</span> Historic district in California, United States

Coso Rock Art District is a rock art site containing over 100,000 Petroglyphs by Paleo-Indians and/or Native Americans. The district is located near the towns of China Lake and Ridgecrest, California. Big and Little Petroglyph Canyons were declared a National Historic Landmark in 1964. In 2001, they were incorporated into this larger National Historic Landmark District. There are several other distinct canyons in the Coso Rock Art District besides the Big and Little Petroglyph Canyons. Also known as Little Petroglyph Canyon and Sand Tanks, Renegade Canyon is but one of several major canyons in the Coso Range, each hosting thousands of petroglyphs. The majority of the Coso Range images fall into one of six categories: bighorn sheep, entopic images, anthropomorphic or human-like figures, other animals, weapons & tools, and "medicine bag" images. Scholars have proposed a few potential interpretations of this rock art. The most prevalent of these interpretations is that they could have been used for rituals associated with hunting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rock art of the Chumash people</span>

Chumash rock art is a genre of paintings on caves, mountains, cliffs, or other living rock surfaces, created by the Chumash people of Southern California. Pictographs and petroglyphs are common through interior California, the rock painting tradition thrived until the 19th century. Chumash rock art is considered to be some of the most elaborate and plentiful rock art tradition in the region.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Burro Flats site</span> Archaeological site in California, United States

The Burro Flats site is a painted cave site located near Burro Flats, in the Simi Hills of eastern Ventura County, California, United States. The Chumash-style "main panel" and the surrounding 25-acres were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, with a boundary decrease in 2020. The main panel includes dozens of pictographs in a variety of colors. The cave is in the mountains, near the bi-lingual Chumash/Fernandeno village of Huwam/Jucjauynga. The Burro Flats painted cave and the rest of the former Santa Susana Field Laboratory are not accessible to the public.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Painted Rock (San Luis Obispo County, California)</span>

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iConji Pictographic writing system

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rudolf Modley</span> Austrian-American executive and graphic designer

Rudolf Modley was an Austrian-American research executive, graphic designer, management consultant and author, who founded Pictorial Statistics Inc. in 1934. He illustrated and wrote a series of books on pictorial statistics and pictorial symbolism.

As a common symbol throughout typographic history, the heart shape has found its way into many character sets and encodings, including those of Unicode. Some characters depict the shape directly, others reference it in a more derived manner.

References