What's next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?

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

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

What's next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?

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.

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