The overview and the plain walkthrough touched the arbitrary sign once. Here it is up close — what Saussure called his “first principle,” from the 1916 French text.
1. A sign is not a “thing and a name”
First, break the naïve picture. The linguistic sign, Saussure says, unites not “a thing and a name” (une chose et un nom) but “a concept and an acoustic image” (un concept et une image acoustique) — Part 1, ch. 1 (French quotations rendered by L/LAB throughout). The “acoustic image” is not the physical sound but its psychic imprint. Saussure later names the two faces signified (signifié, the concept) and signifier (signifiant, the acoustic image). The sign is the whole they form together.
2. The first principle — arbitrariness
Le lien unissant le signifiant au signifié est arbitraire … le signe linguistique est arbitraire.
The bond uniting signifier to signified is arbitrary. … The linguistic sign is arbitrary. (Part 1, ch. 1)
The proof is the diversity of languages itself.
le signifié « bœuf » a pour signifiant b—ö—f d’un côté de la frontière, et o—k—s (Ochs) de l’autre.
The signified “ox” has b—ö—f as its signifier on one side of the border, and o—k—s (Ochs) on the other. (Part 1, ch. 1)
3. Arbitrary does not mean whimsical
“Arbitrary” does not mean “the speaker is free to choose.” Saussure means “unmotivated (immotivé)” — there is no reason linking signifier to signified. No individual can swap a sign for another sound. The sign is imposed on each speaker by the community.
That is exactly why, Saussure says, a sign cannot be debated: a language, “a system of arbitrary signs,” has no ground for it — “there is no reason to prefer sœur to sister, Ochs to bœuf” (il n’y a aucun motif de préférer sœur à sister, Ochs à bœuf, Part 1, ch. 2).
4. Are onomatopoeia and interjections a counter-example?
“What about words that copy a bird’s cry (cuckoo)?” Saussure’s answer: such words are few, and each language has conventionalised them to fit its own sound system. A dog’s bark is ouaoua in French, wauwau in German; a clock goes tic-tac / tick-tack. And words with an onomatopoeic origin (French pigeon < Vulgar Latin pipio) are no longer felt as such.
This is exactly the point Sapir made in 1921 with the analogy of painting: imitative words are not direct outgrowths of nature but cultural creations of each linguistic tradition.
5. Relative arbitrariness
Saussure: “vingt (20) is unmotivated, but dix-neuf (19) is not so to the same degree” — because dix-neuf “evokes the terms it is built from” (il évoque les termes dont il se compose) and others associated with it (dix, neuf, vingt-neuf…). It is a case of “relative motivation” (motivation relative, Part 2, ch. 6).
English is the same. The plural ships evokes the series flags, birds, books… (relatively motivated), while men and sheep evoke nothing (unmotivated). Languages differ in how much they lean on “absolute” versus “relative” arbitrariness — which becomes one axis of later typology.
6. Why it cannot be changed, and yet changes
Arbitrariness implies that a sign could, in theory, be changed. In practice, arbitrariness is exactly what shields the sign from change: there is no ground for debate, the signs are countless, the system is too complex, the community moves by inertia. “A language, at every moment, is everybody’s affair.”
And yet —
Le temps, qui assure la continuité de la langue, a un autre effet, en apparence contradictoire au premier : celui d’altérer plus ou moins rapidement les signes linguistiques.
Time, which assures the continuity of a language, has another effect, seemingly the opposite: it alters the linguistic signs, more or less rapidly. (Part 1, ch. 2)
And alteration is, most often, a “shift in the relation between signifier and signified.” The sign is at once immutable and mutable — and that double nature leads to the next theme.
Next: synchrony and diachrony — seeing a language as a present-tense system or as a current in time. Read alongside Sapir’s “drift”.
