Stan Kelly-Bootle wrote:

"Apart from a few onomatopoeic words, sounds and meanings have
no innate connection. Recall Saussure¹s key notion that the mapping from
signifier to signified is quite arbitrary, a point that VN and some
Nabokovians choose to ignore."

Maybe Nabokov chose to ignore it because he believed, as
you and I don't, that something supernatural was involved,
that the players of some game above our world shaped the
evolution of "stranger" and "danger" to provide a convenient
rhyme at our period of history.

But Saussure's key notion, accepted uncritically by so many, seems to me itself arbitrary. One doesn't have to postulate supernatural players of games above or beyond our world to notice profound links between words, and between words and things, in a given language, and also between languages. Why should these links have been devised above and beyond our world rather than by generations of men and women living in our world?

 

Anthony Stadlen