There is, however, one criterion whose application might result in establishing interesting contrasts between language. It is what might be called the amount of motivation in the vocabulary: some languages make use of a comparatively small stock of monemes because they frequently resort to composition or derivation; their vocabulary may be said to be largely motivated: such a thing being called this or that because it is this or that. Other have a relatively large number of unanalysable designations; their vocabulary is thus more largely arbitrary in the Saussurian sense of the term: a thing is called thus for no discoverable reason, except, perhaps, for the etymologist […] It is quite probably that this contrast between motivated and arbitrary is something of which foreign linguists and local purists are more keenly aware than average users: the present writer, a native Frenchman, had to read the diary of Ernst Jünger at the age of thirty-four before he realized that 'beaucoup de' must once have been identical with the syntagm 'beau coup de'.
- Martinet (1962), a pag.88-89