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.

The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

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

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.

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

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

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