More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.
The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.
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.
A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.
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.
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.
A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.
Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.
Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.
