At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.