While I think that Locke is on to something important when he says words represent ideas, I think that to say that they represent only ideas makes language lose something. Mill has a point that language is useful in describing things as they are in the world outside of our own minds, as in his sun and day example, and it would seem somewhat arrogant to say that the only significance to those words come from the ideas in our own minds. Locke's point of view, to me, captures the arbitrary nature of why specific words have their specific meanings, but ultimately I think there is more to language than that.
As I stated above, Locke's view can seem narrow-minded in that there are more applications to language than just our internal perceptions, especially since the focus of most words is an external object to our minds. By saying that words only have meaning in our minds, Locke seems to be ignoring this aspect of language.
Mill's view, on the other hand, fails to explain/deal with the arbitrary nature of language in that any given word from any given language does not inherently by itself refer to anything for a good reason: we just have a word for any given thing because we agreed to use that word for that thing. In this way one might wonder how can a word be the name of an object itself if there is no inherent connection between the word and that object?
-- André Robert
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