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Ditto. I suspect they could have gotten better international recognition by just using the English words. It would have pissed off the French of course, but th
by johan_larson 9y ago
Ditto. I suspect they could have gotten better international recognition by just using the English words.
It would have pissed off the French of course, but that goes in the win column. ;-)
- nicky0 9y agoThe point was not to get optimal international recognition. Almost the opposite: every symbol should be inoffensive and connote no negative or inappropriate ideas in 108 countries.
- tbabb 9y agoAnd they accomplished that, by designing symbols that convey no meaning whatsoever.
- libeclipse 9y agoY'all down-voting this but it's true. Of course McDonalds is in an excellent position to slowly give these symbols meaning through constant exposure, but inherently the way they're designed does not convey anything at all. They might as well have just used colours or shapes.
- nicky0 9y agoExactly but what shapes? How about a cross, a six pointed star and a crescent? They are simple and distinctive...
- johan_larson 9y agoI'm thinking the swastika is due for reinterpretation. Let's make it mean "fat".
- throwaway2048 9y agoSymbols, in origin, fundamentally have no meaning.
- goldenkey 9y agoYet 99.9999% of the world are no longer babies. So symbols do..not in origin/pouch...have meaning. Why not go with symbols that have inherent meaning rather than unsupplemented ones?
- gumby 9y agoHow true is that? A started as a cow (flip it upside down). That meaning is lost, true, but the Sackcasse (no exit) street sign, or a "T" junction street sign both abstract a physical system. The Korean alphabet shapes relate to the shape your mouth adopts to make the sound. Many Hanzi have structural association (even ignoring the radicals, which you could consider for the purpose of this discussion analogous to spelling) And the meaning of the chemical symbols (e.g. "Fe" as the symbol for iron) made a lot of them easier for me to learn, though if you don't grow up with the right set of languages they are somewhat arbitrary. And, of course, they provide employment for semioticists.
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