Linguistics An Essential Introduction (Version 1.5)

We cannot reconstruct languages beyond a time span of about ten thousand years into the past at best, at which time there were already several quite distinct families of languages, so we do not (and cannot ever) know how language users initially went about associating sounds and gestures with meanings. Some linguists suggest that language users may have had a motivation of some sort, although it is very difficult to see what that might have been, as there simply does not seem to be any natural or logical reason to choose one sequence of sounds (or gestures) over another. But even if there was such a motivation, the examples in (1) — and similar examples for any other word you compare across languages — show that this motivation did not play a role in the subsequent development of languages.

Crucially, once a form-meaning association has emerged in a language community, its members simply accept it as part of an unspoken agreement (a linguistic convention) that this is the word that is used for the entity in question. This convention is not fixed — words can change across time, but it holds at any given moment in a given language community. When we acquire our first languges (or when we learn second languages later in life), we simply observe these associations in the speech of others and imitate them.

We said earlier that if linguistic signs were not arbitrary, there should be cross-linguistic similarities in the words that language communities use for talking about particular entities. This may suggest that if you do find such similarities, this would be evidence against the arbitrariness of linguistic signs.

Of course, such similarities do exist. For example, the English word tree does sound suspiciously similar to the Danish træ or the Swedish träd, and we can see a slightly more distant similarity to words like Polish drzewo or Ukrainian Де́рево (derevo). Likewise, Dutch boom or Yiddish בוים (boym) are similar to German Baum, Spanish árbol or Romanian arbore sound similar to French arbre, Kasakh ағаш (ağaş) or Azerbaijani ağac are similar to Turkish ağaç, and so on.

However, these similarities do not point to a natural connection between certain concepts and sound sequences. The similarities are due to the fact that the groups of languages sharing similar words also share a common ancestor language and the words in question developed from a word in that ancestor language — Proto Germanic *trewam and *baumaz (the asterisk in this case means that the forms are reconstructed rather than documented), Latin arbor, and Proto-Turkic **ïgač.

Similarities may also exist across unrelated languages. For example, the word for Internet is internet in Turkish, אינטרנט (iyn’ter’net) in Hebrew, internet in Vietnamese, internet in Azerbaijani and インターネット (Intānetto) in Japanese, despite the fact that these languages belong to different families with no known common ancestor (if they do have such an ancestor, it must have been spoken at least 12000 to 15000 years ago, long before the invention of the Internet).

Here, the similarity is due to the fact that the language communities using these languages all borrowed the English word Internet. This is obvious for this particular case, but borrowings are often less immediately recognizable, so we should check the history of a word before claiming it as evidence against arbitrariness

Sometimes we find similarities across languages that are not entirely due to shared ancestry or borrowing — for example the word for ‘a brownish-gray medium-sized bird with a long tail that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds’ (see Figure 2.2.3).

The form associated with the concept of this bird is cuckoo in English, Kuckuck in German, coucou in French, kukułka in Polish, guguk in Turkish, カッコウ (kakkō) in Japanese and cu cu in Vietnamese. In some cases, the similarity is due to borrowing (English borrowed its word from French), in some cases to relationships between lanaguages (cuckoo replaced Middle English cukkuk, which shares an origin with German Kuckuck). But most cases emerged independently.

So where does the similarity across languages come from? A likely explanation is that different language communities independently hit upon the same idea when naming this bird: it has a very distinctive call, and the words seem to be imitations of that call.

It seems, then, that there are a few true exceptions to the principle of arbitrariness. However, note that the exception is only partial: the words sound similar, but not identical across languages. If you are interested in a broader look at possible relations between form and meaning, read the Section 2.6, if you want to know more about limits to arbitrariness in language, read in Section 2.6.

The fact that linguistic signs are arbitrary makes human languages very powerful, as it allows us to express any meaning whatsoever. A system based on similarity would be extremely limited, as it would allow us to express a meaning only if we could create a form that resembles that meaning — in the case of spoken language, it would limit us to words for entities that have a characteristic sound associated with them (like the cuckoo), in the case of signed language or other visual communication systems, such as traffic signs, it would limit us to words for entities that are typical and easily representable.

However, note that the arbitrariness of form-meaning associations is clearly limited within languages. In any given language, simple words are combined into complex words according to relatively systematic rules, and this often leads to a certain internal logic in the vocabulary of these languages. For example, in English the sound sequences associated with the concepts for specific trees usually contain the sound sequence associated with the word tree: oak tree, pine tree, maple tree, apple tree, pear tree, cherry tree, etc. This is due to the fact that English compound words are formed in such a way that the second part refers to the broader category to which the concept belongs (actually, that is a bit of a simplification, we will discuss compounds in more detail in Chapter 7). In this way, arbitrariness is reduced within English: if you see a word that ends in tree, you can be relatively certain that it is associated with the concept for a type of tree, and if you go looking for the word for a particular type of tree, you should not be surprised if it contains the word tree. However, the words are still arbitrary when we look at them from outside the language: first, because there is no reason why the form tree and the concept TREE are associated in the first place, and second, because we can never be sure that the vocabulary of a particular language is motivated in this way. Even in English, speakers typically call the first three trees mentioned above oak, pine, and maple and other languages do not use compounds at all.

There is a second way in which the association between form and meaning is arbitrary: different languages divide up their conceptual space in different ways before associating meanings with the resulting divisions. Table 2.2.5 shows the English, French, Danish and German words for various concepts related to TREE.

As you can see, the conceptual space of trees, the groups in which they occur in natural settings, the material they consist of and the uses that humans make of these materials is divided in different ways in the four languages. For example, English and French use the same sound sequences for small groups of trees and for the material that trees consist of (wood and bois respectively), and they have a different word for large groups of trees (forest and forêt; which, by the way, sound similar only because the English language community borrowed the word from French). In contrast, Danish and German use the same word for large and small groups of trees (skov in Danish and Wald in German, which also has Wäldchen, a transparent diminutive of Wald). Danish uses the same word for trees and the material of which they consist, which none of the other languages do. Even within one language, different varieties may split up the world in slightly different ways. For example, the word timber is used in both British and American English for trees that are grown in order to use them for construction; in British English, it is also used once the wood has been processed into beams, boards, planks etc., but in American English it is then called lumber.

The way that languages divide up the conceptual space is not completely random, of course. It is to a certain extent motivated by the relations of concepts within this space — it would be very odd to find a language that used the same word for the concepts TREE and HEALTH INSURANCE, or for FOREST and COOKIE. But the precise divisions vary even in the languages of closely related cultures, and thus they are fundamentally arbitrary.

CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. Written by Anatol Stefanowitsch