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sign language
sign language gestural communication used as an alternative or replacement for speech. Sign languages resemble oral languages in every way other than their modality. As with oral languages, sign languages are acquired spontaneously and have highly intricate, rule-governed grammar and phonology ....
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omen
omen sign or augury believed to foreshadow the future. Almost any occurrence can be interpreted as an omen. The typical omen was a natural phenomenon, such as a meteor, an eclipse, or the flight of birds. Among the Greeks and Romans the interpretation of omens was a major part of religious life and...
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semiotics
semiotics or semiology, discipline deriving from the American logician C. S. Peirce and the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure . It has come to mean generally the study of any cultural product (e.g., a text) as a formal system of signs. Saussure's key notion of the arbitrary nature of the...
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commerce
commerce traffic in goods, usually thought of as trade between states or nations. Engaged in by all peoples from the earliest times, it has been carried on in some areas and by some peoples more than others, because of special geographical, technological, or economic advantages. The Egyptians, the ...
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Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes , 1915-80, French critic. Barthes was one of the founding figures in the theoretical movement centered around the journal Tel Quel. In his earlier works, such as Writing Degree Zero (tr. 1953) and Mythologies (1957, tr. 1972), he argued that literature, like all forms of communi...
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trade
trade traffic in goods. Conducted by gift, barter, or sale, trade is one of the most widespread of all social institutions.
Early Trade
The discovery of nonlocal objects at many archaeological sites strongly suggests that trade existed in prehistoric times. Anthropologists and other explo...
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Hall effect
Hall effect experiment that shows the sign of the charge carriers in a conductor. In 1879 E. H. Hall discovered that when he placed a metal strip carrying a current in a magnetic field , a voltage difference was produced across the strip. The side of the strip that is at the higher voltage depends...
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symbol
symbol sign representing something that has an independent existence. The most important use of symbols is in language . To say so, however, does not solve the perennial philosophical questions as to the nature of the linguistic sign. Signs are usually iconic, or related to what they signify, wher...
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radical
radical in mathematics, symbol placed over a number or expression, called the radicand, to indicate a root of the radicand. When used without a sign or index number, it designates the positive square root of the radicand, i.e., 2. If both square roots are meant, the radical sign is preceded by &p...
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tablature
tablature , in music, a generic system of musical notation indicating actions that the player must take, rather than "representing" the music itself that will result from those actions. Tablatures have been in use in the West since the early 14th cent., mostly for keyboard and plucked string i...
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