In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.

---

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

---

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.

---

It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.

---

A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.

---

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.

---

The very special place that a language occupies among institutions is undeniable, but there is much more to be said-, a comparison would tend rather to bring out the differences.

---

The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

---

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

---

Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.

---