“Whitney wanted to eradicate the idea that in the case of a language we are dealing with a natural faculty; in fact, social institutions stand opposed to natural institutions.”
Author details
Related authors
Other Ferdinand de Saussure Quotes
The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.
Ferdinand de Saussure 
61% of people like this quote
Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.
Ferdinand de Saussure
60% of people like this quote
The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.
Ferdinand de Saussure
60% of people like this quote
Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.
Ferdinand de Saussure
58% of people like this quote
In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.
Ferdinand de Saussure
56% of people like this quote