De Saussure's Reciprocity Between Words and Languages

The complicated nature of de Saussure's writing admittedly threw me for a loop this week; however, I truly enjoyed the concept that "within the same language, all words used to express related ideas limit each other reciprocally," meaning that the value of a word increases with the number of competitors, or synonyms, that word has (de Saussure 8). This occurs because if a word did not exist, all of its content meaning would be assigned to its competitors. This is a strange concept to think about at first, but it does make sense. In my opinion, the most important sentence of the reading is that "their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not" (de Saussure 9). The variation in words is what makes language beautiful; it is what gives value to certain concepts. If we only had one word for each concept in language, there would be far less depth and richness to language as a whole. For example, if "pretty" were the only word that we had to describe something that is aesthetically pleasing, the old would be a much more boring place, and our writing, literature, and conversations would be much less colorful.
Another, related idea that de Saussure introduces is that words do not stand for pre-existing concepts; he states that "if words stood for pre-existing concepts, they would all have exact equivalents in meaning from one language to the next; but this is not true" (de Saussure 8). There are many discrepancies between languages in the words used to describe concepts; there are many words in some languages that do not translate to other languages. For example, I took Italian in high school, and the Italians have a number of concepts and traditions that are unfamiliar to English-speaking people. "Abboccio," or a feeling of drowsiness from eating a big meal, does not directly translate into a single English word. Because of this, words do not stand for pre-existing concepts, but instead correspond to concepts that are defined "not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system" (de Saussure 9). Language is arbitrary, a concept which I had never before considered. I found this idea, as well as the rest of de Saussure's writing, to be extremely helpful in explaining the nature of language and the relationship between languages.