Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980) a French semiotician, whose work stands unrivalled in many respects in providing insights into all aspects of social and cultural life as semiotically organised, had developed the notion of the motivated sign. He stated in his article ‘Myth today’: What is a characteristic of myth? It is to transform a meaning into forms. In other words, myth is a language-robbery.
He also states that: Myth is a type of speech. Speech of this kind is a message. It is therefore by no means confined to oral speech. It can consist of modes of writing or of representations; not only written discourse, but also photography, cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity, all these can serve as a support to mythical speech. Myth can be defined neither by its object nor by its material, for any material can arbitrarily be endowed with meaning. (Annette Lavers, 1984).
Human have constantly attempted at a theoretical unification of the different modes of representations. Much effort has been put into research and experimentation to documenting observations drawn from the responses. From the early day Garrick Mallery’s book titled Picture Writing of the American Indians to recent year Milton Glaser’s ‘I love NY’ logo, many visual representations marked the evolutionary track of language.
Laymen may ask if there is but a sign language, universally understood, the answer is ‘no’. But we are closer to the ultimate unification with mutual agreement in the use of signs through these research and experimentation. One of the most recent break-through was the development of ‘picture language’.
A conference paper published from NPO Pangaea, which is a non-profit organization located in Japan, during 2006 Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference at Alberta, Canada. An observation made through a play between 10 – 14 year-old Japanese and Korean children, where there was a blank sheet of canvas prepared for them and observation done through, firstly: how children substitute words by pictograms and does pictograms have an alternative function? Secondly: do children use it to symbolize the exact meaning what they want to convey or include their emotions as well even if the ultimate presentation becomes ambiguous?
Some of the interesting sentences were constructed, for example ‘Why are Korean’s teeth beautiful?’ and even long sentences like ‘I went to my grandparents’ house and did the bubble. It was pleasant.’ The conclusion drawn was pictograms were alternatively exchanged for vocabulary words and used as rough concept to a message. In other words, even if the meaning of a pictogram was not clear, children replaced pictograms to creates parts of pictures and tell the remaining stories. There was a clear message that children were able to used pictographs in various ways. Indeed, it is great potential in the used of pictograms in replacing language.
In a research paper written by Kazunari Ito, a Ph.D. Degree student in Computer Science from Keio University in 2005, where he had developed a prototype to automate conversion of language to a pictogram representation in computer. The users just have to key in a group of computer-generated command to convert a simple English or Japanese sentence into pictograms representation, be it in still or animated form. A user need to push the button ‘register’ after punching in a simple command like: ‘I walked to hospital from school’. The conversion from text to pictogram has made possible to facilitate people with problems in understanding words for example people diagnosed with Dyslexia. Once again this has proved that pictogram is possible to be developed into more comprehensible and fully proficient in taking centre stage in the communication process in future.
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