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"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."
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"Words are the fallen ruins of silent majesty."
"We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word."
"Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals."
"We float in language like icebergs " four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience."
"Jeez, Hazel," Percy said, "tell your horse to watch his language."Hazel tried not to laugh. "What did he say?""With the cussing removed? He said he can get us to the top."Frank looked incredulous. "I thought the horse couldn't fly!"This time Arion whinnied so angrily, even Hazel could guess he was cursing."Dude," Percy told the horse, "I've gotten suspended for saying less than that..."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth."
"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."
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