Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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