Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
Ferdinand de SaussureThe 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.
Ferdinand de SaussureOutside 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 SaussureIn 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