In an article in Poetics Today , Dieter Freundlieb notes that “Saussure argues that ‘in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system’ . . . While Saussure himself does not specifically address this issue, it seems to follow from his theory that languages ‘carve up’ reality in different ways. How this is done is then entirely arbitrary and simply a matter of relations between units internal to the system.”

That seems right to me, but raises questions about the use of Saussure in biblical studies, where Barr’s challenge to the notion that we can read “worldview” from specific language has been taken to mean that specific languages have no particular effect on the thought of their users.