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More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.
Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.
Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.
A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.
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.
Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
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.
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.
Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.
