Branches Quote by Ferdinand de Saussure

The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression.

— Eugene Wigner

Languages exist by arbitrary institutions and conventions among peoples; words, as the dialecticians tell us, do not signify naturally, but at our pleasure.

— Francois Rabelais

There cannot be a language more universal and more simple, more free from errors and obscurities...more worthy to express the invariable relations of all…

— Joseph Fourier

For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used allusively, but never even approximately in a comparative way, since, corresponding as it…

— Franz Kafka

The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree…

— Anonymous

My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

— Noam Chomsky

English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in…

— Willard Van Orman Quine

The process of specialization tends, almost inevitably, to narrow the sources from which the rules of any science are drawn; and English law is…

— Edward Jenks

The ultimate law of language is, dare we say, that nothing can ever reside in a single term. This is a direct consequence of…

— Ferdinand de Saussure

It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern expressed in language. Any concept, whether or not it…

— Edward Sapir

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things…

— Giambattista Vico

Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.

— Albert Einstein