Best quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure on Language

Checkout quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure on Language

• ‟ A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.

  - Ferdinand de Saussure
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics.

  - Ferdinand de Saussure
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.

  - Ferdinand de Saussure
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Ferdinand de Saussure
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ The very special place that a language occupies among institutions is undeniable, but there is much more to be said-, a comparison would tend rather to bring out the differences.

  - Ferdinand de Saussure
  

• ‟ Whitney wanted to eradicate the idea that in the case of a language we are dealing with a natural faculty; in fact, social institutions stand opposed to natural institutions.

  - Ferdinand de Saussure