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1. Introduction: "To invent a language arbitrarily without any reason for the choices made, is for the human soul, who needs for everything at least a partial reason, as painful as it is for the body to be tickled to death. " Herder 1770 / 1985 p. 85 (transl. D. F. ) What is the term arbitrary refers to? Is there any direct relation between the linguistic form and the linguistic meaning of a word? Why do words differ from language to language?
What is onomatopoeic sounds and what is iconic means? Do they arbitrary? Is there any non-arbitrary symbol or word in the world? Do items and concepts, etc.
in a language have names that correspond to their very nature (physi's), or are the names of concepts and ideas, etc. arbitrary, and dependent upon an agreed upon convention? Does language fall somewhere in between these two positions? These questions are those with which people deals with from the beginning of the history.
In this paper I will try to examine; the meaning of arbitrariness, the view of Ferdinand de Saussure- the father of the modern linguistics- about the issue, the kinds of arbitrariness, the non-arbitrary symbols and words- onomatopoeia and iconic-, and the other non-arbitrary symbols. And I will try to support that the arbitrary feature is not wholly acceptable for all languages and all words in the languages. May main focus language will be English, but as a reference I will use Turkish and German as well as some other languages. 2. The Arbitrary and Non-arbitrary 2. 1. What is the Term Arbitrariness? "Any symbol can be mapped onto any concept (or even onto one of the rules of the grammar). For instance, there is nothing about the Spanish or Portuguese word nada itself that forces Spanish speakers to use it to mean "nothing." That is the meaning all Spanish speakers have memorized for that sound pattern.
But for Croatian or Serbian speakers nada means 'hope'. " It is the definition given by the world's best known e-encyclopedia, Wikipedia, for arbitrariness. According to the authorities in a university in America, arbitrariness is that "Form and meaning is not incoherently connected. There is no logic or reason that a hand in the world should be represented by the sound: [hnd]. The words of a language represent a connection between the sounds, which give its form, and a meaning, which those sounds represent. Meaning + Form = SIGN" Now let's look at some definitions from linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and other science men: " 1 - Saussure: Language is a convention and the nature of the sign that is agreed upon does not matter... Because the sign is arbitrary, it follows no law other than that of tradition, and because it is based upon tradition, it is arbitrary. 'Arbitrary'...
should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker... I mean that it is unmotivated i. e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified. Only differences that make it possible to distinguish this word from all others... carry significance...
since one vocal image is no better suited than the next for what it is commissioned to express... 'Arbitrary' and 'differential' are two correlative qualities... Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others... The arbitrary nature of the sign explains in turn why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system - by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value... A particular language-state is always the product of historical forces and these forces explain why the sign is unchangeable i. e. why it resists any arbitrary substitution...
The community itself cannot control as much as a single word; it is bound to the existing language... No longer can language be identified with a contract pure and simple. 2 - Hockey: Arbitrariness; the relation between a meaningful element in language and its denotation is independent of any physical and geometrical resemblance between the two... or, as we say, the semantic relation is arbitrary rather than iconic. 3 - Yuen Ren Chao: Language is a conventional system of habitual vocal behaviour. Before the establishment of a convention, any word could mean anything. 4 - Engle field: The fact that languages are arbitrary is sufficient evidence that they were invented. In any language there are conventional ways of combining words to express the relations between ideas. There is no systematic correspondence between the forms of language and its meanings. 5 - Hermann: What meaning is conditioned to which sign is basically quite arbitrary and therefore there is an element of randomness or absence of logical necessity in the relationship of sign and object signified. 6 - Gregory: Just because words differ between languages, and because languages are so recent and change so rapidly, it is quite clear that our knowledge of the names of things cannot be innate.
It cannot be built into the nervous system. Words and names cannot be inherited. 7 - Wittgenstein: I want you to remember that words have these meanings which we have given them and we give them meanings by explanations. A word has the meaning someone has given it. " As we understand from the definitions given above, arbitrariness is the linguistic term means that there is no direct relation between the form and the meaning of a word. Any word in any language differs from one another and also differs between the languages. For example, the English word 'book' is not the same neither in spelling nor in meaning with the word 'pen'.
In English we say 'horse' to a fast running animal but the Germans call 'per', the Frenchman 'cheval', the Cree Indian 'misa tim', in Turkish we say 'at' and so on. Or another example 'rose' is the word we say for a flower; it is in Japanese and rosa in Spanish. Another good example of these difference can be exactly seen in the word love. What the others in the world say instead of love? -Afrikaans: life, -Albanian: dashuroj, -Alentejano (Portugal): Porn, -Alsacien: hoa, -Arabic: herbal, -Assamese: today, -Basc: Matter, -Back: rohan, -Bolivian: Quechua, -Bulgarian: Obicha, -Cantonese: Ngo, -Czech: milli, -Esperanto: ama's, -German: lieb, -Japanese: Suitonnen, -Turkish love, -Zulu: yakut, and so on... Another point here is that why we say a 'wall' a wall? Why is not it a dog or something else?
Who distinguishes it? Who gave it that name? And what will happen if we say 'cat' instead of 'wall' when we try to define the object which covers a room? The answer is quite simple: there will be ambiguity. We will not be understood and the message that we try to send to the receiver will become different. Because the meaning is settled in our lexical dictionary with the symbol we gave to it.
The words resemble the meaning and the shape what we gave to it as Wittgenstein mentioned. 2. 2. What Saussure Says About the Subject? Saussure's arbitrariness is simply that there is no natural connection between the signifier and the signified. That is simply that the signifier is unmotivated: arbitrary in relation to its signified with which it has no connection in deed. Saussure focused on that the use of symbol to designate the linguistic sign is awkward, for it is characteristic of symbols that they are never wholly arbitrary.
For the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, Saussure claims that as the most important truth and explains it with saying "The hierarchical place of this truth is right at the top. Only gradually does one come to realize how many different facts are only ramifications, hidden consequences of that truth. Saussure, he thinks that it is wrong to treat language as a mere nomenclature, so he turns to another way of interpretation of language, that is, the systematic analysis of language. Saussure's Principle of arbitrariness, with a priority of arbitrariness to iconicity, is a reaction against the rival classical views of arbitrariness and iconicity. His principle of arbitrariness is oriented to his unique theory of synchronic structure of language. The so-called iconicity of the linguistic sign they claim is fundamentally based on its arbitrariness.
What he ignores when saying that is that he sees all the onomatopoeic and iconic symbols as a little part of language and he ignores...
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