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. Ferdinand de Saussure Read Quote
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. Ferdinand de Saussure Read Quote
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. Ferdinand de Saussure Read Quote
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. Ferdinand de Saussure Read Quote
It is only since linguistics has become more aware of its object of study, i.e. perceives the whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest to almost anyone. Ferdinand de Saussure Read Quote
Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar. Ferdinand de Saussure Read Quote
Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth. Ferdinand de Saussure Read Quote
A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs. Ferdinand de Saussure Read Quote
A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas. Ferdinand de Saussure Read Quote