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

Categorized in : Games Different Connections

The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

Ferdinand de Saussure

arbitrary connections

I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.

Ferdinand de Saussure

cold-hearted paradox serious

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.

Ferdinand de Saussure

differences vices law

Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law

Ferdinand de Saussure

language law reason-why

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas...

Ferdinand de Saussure

differences sound ideas

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

Ferdinand de Saussure

uncharted nebula language

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.

Ferdinand de Saussure

individual speech sides

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Ferdinand de Saussure

communication community law

Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.

Ferdinand de Saussure

obscure language views

Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

Ferdinand de Saussure

our-thoughts mass expression

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.

Ferdinand de Saussure

language study would-be

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.

Ferdinand de Saussure

independent speech firsts

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

Ferdinand de Saussure

organs individual language

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

Ferdinand de Saussure

evoke institutions might

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

groups different memories

Of all social institutions language is least amenable to initiative. It blends with the life of society, and the latter, inert by nature, is a prime conservative force.

Ferdinand de Saussure

initiative conservative language

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

Ferdinand de Saussure

grammar language study

Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages.

Ferdinand de Saussure

psychology language social

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

able different language

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

language goes-on ideas