#Quote
More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.
Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.
Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.
Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.
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.
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.
Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.
The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
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.
