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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.