Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

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.

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 connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

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

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.