#Quote
More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.
Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
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.
Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.
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.
The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.
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.
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.
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.
