 Medieval logicians and philosophers of language were principally concerned with the relationship between utterances, concepts, and things. Written language was only of secondary importance. They agreed that spoken language was conventional, having its origin in imposition, or the decision to correlate certain sounds with certain objects. Concepts, however, were natural, in the sense that all human beings with similar experiences had the same concepts, without any decision being involved. The key semantic notion was signification, rather than meaning, though translated sources tend to obscure this by translating ‘significatio’ as ‘meaning’. For a term to signify is for it to function as a sign, to represent or make known something beyond itself. A typical spoken term, such as ‘horse’ or ‘dog’, signifies in two ways. It signifies or makes known the concept with which it has to be correlated in order to function significatively at all, and it also signifies or makes known something external to and independent of the mind. Modifications were made to this simple scheme to cover the cases of special terms, including syncategorematic terms, such as ‘every’ and ‘not’, fictional terms such as ‘chimera’, and privative terms such as ‘blindness’; and modifications were also made to cover the case of special predicates, such as “is a genus”, or “is thought about”, but we need not concern ourselves with these modifications here.