The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.

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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.

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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.

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Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.

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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.

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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.

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Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.

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The ultimate law of language is, dare we say, that nothing can ever reside in a single term. This is a direct consequence of the fact that linguistic signs are unrelated to what they designate and that, therefore, 'a' cannot designate anything without the the aid of 'b' and vice versa, or, in other words, that both have value only by the difference between them.

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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.

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Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

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