Quoted By:
"The “arbitrary” part means that the relationship between the form (the sounds / words / letters / characters) that we use have no natural/meaningful relationship with their meaning, therefore this relationship (between form and meaning) is said to be arbitrary.
The evidence for this is pretty simple:
If I say the word knjiga, it’s probably meaningless to you. You would have to look it up. But hear the word book, you recall an image of books, you have background knowledge, there’s a host of associations in your mind. The same thing doesn’t happen for knjiga even though it means ‘book’ in Serbian. You would have to look it up, or Google it, to understand what knjiga refers to. We could even be talking about a specific book, the very same same book, the one sitting there on the table, but the two words bear very little relation to each other…hence, the arbitrary relationship between form (language) and meaning (in this case a concrete object)."
