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

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

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

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.

Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.