Saussure Reading Response

This post is in response/to add on to what Melissa posted last week about language as a social contract and how members of a community have to agree on linguistic as well as visual signs in order to communicate. The last part of Melissa's post where she discussed Saussure's idea that a person who loses the ability to speak would still be able to communicate with others because he would still understand both linguistic and visual signs being presented to him, made me remember something that an teacher I had in elementary school had told me about when she had taught in Nunavut. Inuit children don't usually nod their heads to express either "yes" or "no", instead they often raise their eyebrows really high and open their eyes wide to express "yes" and scrunch up their noses to express "no". I remember when she told me and the rest of the class, we all thought it was funny and really couldn't imagine doing it. However, thinking about it now it really re-inforces and acts as a good example of Saussure's ideas about the agreement communities have concerning words and signs. Obviously, if a person from Ontario for example, had no prior knowledge of these signs they wouldn't understand and may even misunderstand the action for another meaning, if a person from Nunavut tried to communicate either one because in Ontario, like many other places, we have a different agreement about the actions. This relates directly to Saussure saying that words arbitrary as in this example the actual visual signs are arbitrary, as two completely different actions can mean the exact same thing depending on the social agreement in a particular community concerning the agreement.