The fire of oak logs The fire of oak logs which burned day and night for six months became the focal point of our family life. ...It is inevitable that the English word "home" cannot be translated directly into French. The nearest equivalent in French is the word foyer, the hearth. Lawrence Wylie, Village in the Vaucluse Thermal Delight in Architecture homefirefamilylanguage
The arbitrariness of the sign A key difference between verbal language and the modernist ideal of a visual “language” is the arbitrariness of a verbal sign, which has no natural, inherent relationship to the concept it represents. The sound of the word “horse”, for example, does not innately resemble the concept of a horse. Ferdinand de Saussure called this arbitrariness the fundamental feature of the verbal sign. The meaning of a sign is generated by its relationship to other signs in the language: the sign’s legibility lies in its difference from other signs. Ellen Lupton & J. Abbott Miller, The ABC's of ▲■●: The Bauhaus and Design Theory Gods of the Word soundmeaninglanguage