A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.

Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.

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.

Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

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.

Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.