Hi dear steemians!
This time I’m back in english, but the present material will be also available in spanish because of the relevance of this information, in my judgements. This was one of the main subjects of my studies at the university.
So today’s topic is related to linguistics and some of the first theories of important worldwide linguists.
First of all let’s introduce what linguistics is about.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. The earliest activities in the documentation and description of language have been attributed to the 4th century BCE Indian grammarian Paṇini, who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī.
Now let’s present the theory of Ferdinand de Saussure: Suisse linguist, precursor of XX century modern linguistics.
I will support the next explanations with the fallowing images that I have prepared, for you to better understand the idea.
For Saussure the linguistic sign is like a coin, whose faces are inseparable.
The meaning or content is the mental representation that we make ourselves from everything. So, the meaning would not be the lion itself as a real object, but the concept that the person deduces from what a lion is.
The signifier or form has been considered the material part of the sign (the sound or the written letter) and it allows the meaning to be present. That's why they work as a binomial.
Once we have understood these last ideas, it’s now easier to get to the meanings of the following diagram.
We begin with the symbol, which represents, as we have seen before, this duality between meaning and signifier.
This is due to a fundamental concept in linguistics: The arbitrariness of the sign.
The linguistic sign is arbitrary because the relationship between the meaning and the signifier is conventional, that is, there’s nothing that indicates or obliges the house to be called “house” or that, what we represent ourselves mentally as a flat surface with three or four legs that serves to hold objects, has to be necessarily called “table”.
We can see this concept clearly if we think of all the languages other than our mother language. In each one we see that different chains of sounds correspond to the same mental representation.
Example: dog (english), perro (spanish), der Hund (german), cane (italian).
All these signifiers bring our minds to the same notion, to the same concept: 
In order to continue analyzing the triangle, it’s the time to the notion. This is nothing more than the other face or the other half of the coin. It represents the meaning in the cognitive process of the human being. It's the image we represent in our mind as a result of any visual or acoustic image (the signifier).
And finally, the referent is the existing object of the reality, which is represented by its corresponding linguistic sign.
Even when we think we're not thinking, our mind is doing a hard work while bringing and getting information from everywhere and everything.
I have prepared this post with my heart, loving what I do and what I have studied. I really enjoy while writing and I am eager to continue doing it.
I hope it will be a profitable and helpful post for all of you.
Best regards dear friends
Have a good night!