Here you've got a red light which doesn't seem to enter into this sense of the arbitrary and differential.

这里，红灯看起来并没有,任意性和差异性。

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And human language uses this amazing trick described by Ferdinand de Saussure, the great linguist, as "The arbitrariness of the sign."

人类语言使用这些,被语言学家费迪南德·德·索绪尔,称之为"符号任意性"的神奇把戏

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Their relationship is necessary but, as we'll see in a minute, arbitrary, and each sign is like that.

这种关系十分必要，但是它又有任意性。

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The absolute number that you assign to it is something that's arbitrary. You have to set what the zero is. And so there's a well-understood convention for what the zero is.

你指定给它的绝对值是有任意性的,你需要设定零点的位置,因此有一个经过充分研究的,关于设定零点的约定。

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Arbitrary and differential are two correlative qualities.

任意性和差异性是两个相关的属性。

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The signs are both arbitrary and differential.

符号具有任意性和差异性。

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As I say, red tends to be chosen, but then if you get lab experiments showing that that particular color of gas blue is somehow or another sort of more invasive of your consciousness than red is, then you move away from the arbitrariness of the choice of red as a color.

所以人们就倾向于选择红灯，但是如果你想用实验证明,比如说烟蓝色或者,其他任何另一种颜色比红色更加醒目，那么你就忽视了颜色选择上的任意性。

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And what this means is we can use --take any arbitrary idea in the world, the idea of a chair or a story or a country, and make a sound or a sign to connect to it.

符号任意性是指,我们可以拿来世间任何想法,比如椅子,故事,或是国家,再发明一种声音或符号来与之相联系

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