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

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas...

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.

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.

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

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.

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.