#Quote
More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.
Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.
Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.
The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.
The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.
A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.
Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.
The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.
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.
