This 66th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them.

On Linguistic Arbitrariness

• Arbitrariness is characteristic of human spoken language, that is, the language creates the conditions. This is the linguistic relativity hypnosis.

• Linguistic signs are arbitrary. For example, tree in French is árbole.

• Onomatopoeia is arbitrary. There are different ways of imitating a dog bark in different languages but this is not correct. Whatever the nationality of the dog, he will always bark woof-woof. Another example is the colour white that means different things in different countries.

• Arbitrariness in languages means that we cannot judge languages as good or bad, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are not sufficient to judge any language due to arbitrariness.

• Languages are arbitrary because people are the creation of words in many cases. For example, the word internet was created by wide usage. This word even has its own word classes.

• Categorisation has arbitrariness, for example, the rainbow has categorisation. It has colours that are difficult to distinguish, since we have the colours divided into different compartments, it is difficult to find a concept of colour that we have for that colour of the rainbow.

• For example, a cow refers to the female species but it can also be used when one is exasperated with the causal personality of someone. This is due to the fact of habitual use, the object of pragmatics.

More to come...

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