Two wrongs DO make a right

How are words formed? Have you ever begged yourself to answer that question, only to come up with no solution? How did "bat" assign itself to the animal and the stick used for wacking a baseball? How did language and its variations come about? Ferdinand de Saussure and his "Course in General Linguistics" answers the birds and bees question of language. What is most interesting, is that, like babies are made, language is made: by opposites coming together (male and female) to form a positive (baby). It is by this virtue of negative difference which plays a determining factor in the knowledge of consuming and understanding language all together.

First off, it is important to note that "the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary"(62). That is to say, the word chair was not assigned to the object chair through natural inheritance. There is nothing naturally inheritable about language, despite that its value is determined by its environment. So that is to say, language is socially determined. Our words are placed in the dictionary because the community has agreed upon that chair should be assigned to the concept of a chair, that is, a thing which we sit on. Despite that we may think that words virtually come out of thin air when we see an object, is false. This is because there are no pre-existing concepts of what a chair is, which means that not all languages use the word "chair" to describe the thing which we sit on.

Take into account this clip from the TV series, Family Guy



Stewie encounters his first see-n-say and disputes with the onomatopoeic sounds emitting from the toy. If language were naturally inherited by all humans on earth, then the sounds of the see-n-say should in fact be universal. All cows should say "moo", but here, Stewie encounters a problem with the way that a cow in Europe says "Shazoo!" Language is not universal because concepts (or rather their value) "is accordingly determined by its environment; it is impossible to fix even the value of the word "sun" without first considering its surroundings; in some languages it is not possible to say "sit in the sun"(67). In fact, some languages do not even have words for the simplest things such as color. While this is a shock to some (probably mostly for English speakers, considering we have an array of variable color words), to that specific language, it is really no bother. For,"[i]f words stood for pre-existing concepts, they would all have the exact same equivalents in meaning from one language to the next; but this is not true"(67), which means if it were in fact true, there would be only one language.

To further emphasize that concepts (signified) are separate from their sound-image (signified) let's consider the American Sign Language signs for weather:



Now let's compare it with the British Sign Language signs for weather:



While there are some similarities you should note the differences. No two languages are considerably the same, taking into account that all language is born of its environment. To further enhance Saussure's claim, if I were to say "this a cool theory, ya dig?" our knowledge of oppositions in our language would allow us to determine what this sentence actually means. No the theory isn't cold, and no you're not digging--so if it's not these options--then you know that this theory is good and that you understand it.

In conclusion, language is only determined on what it isn't, rather than what it is.


Saussure, Ferdinand De. "Course in General Linguistics." Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 59-71. Print.