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More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.
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.
Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.
Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.
Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.
