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

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

Remember that the pharynx is at a crossroads from which leads off, at the top, the passage to the mouth cavity and the passage to the nasal cavity, and below, the passage to the larynx.

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

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

The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.

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