More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
Of all social institutions language is least amenable to initiative. It blends with the life of society, and the latter, inert by nature, is a prime conservative force.
Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.
Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.
The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs.
A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.
In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics.
It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.
Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.
Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
