"A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs"
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Saussure’s sentence lands like a clipped, almost brutal reminder that language isn’t a floating library of words; it’s a social machine built on bodies. “Presupposes” is doing the heavy lifting. He’s not admiring language’s beauty so much as pointing out its hidden prerequisite: before you get grammar, metaphor, or “meaning,” you need a population equipped to produce and perceive signals. The “organs” aren’t just a coy nod to tongues and ears. They stand in for the full biological and cognitive apparatus that makes participation possible.
The subtext is quietly polemical against two temptations Saussure spent his career resisting. One is treating language as a purely individual talent, like a private style. The other is treating it as a metaphysical essence that exists independent of speakers. By anchoring language in shared human equipment, he makes it collective by necessity. A language can only function if its users overlap in capacities enough to stabilize norms: the same kinds of mouths can form comparable sounds; the same perceptual limits carve the acoustic world into similar categories; the same attention and memory constraints make patterns learnable.
Context matters: this is early 20th-century linguistics, when Saussure is building the foundations of structuralism and arguing that the system (langue) is prior to individual utterances (parole). The line reads almost like a preemptive strike on romantic ideas of speech as pure self-expression. It’s also a subtle boundary-drawing move: language is social, but not magical. Its “rules” are cultural, yet they ride on a shared human chassis.
The subtext is quietly polemical against two temptations Saussure spent his career resisting. One is treating language as a purely individual talent, like a private style. The other is treating it as a metaphysical essence that exists independent of speakers. By anchoring language in shared human equipment, he makes it collective by necessity. A language can only function if its users overlap in capacities enough to stabilize norms: the same kinds of mouths can form comparable sounds; the same perceptual limits carve the acoustic world into similar categories; the same attention and memory constraints make patterns learnable.
Context matters: this is early 20th-century linguistics, when Saussure is building the foundations of structuralism and arguing that the system (langue) is prior to individual utterances (parole). The line reads almost like a preemptive strike on romantic ideas of speech as pure self-expression. It’s also a subtle boundary-drawing move: language is social, but not magical. Its “rules” are cultural, yet they ride on a shared human chassis.
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| Topic | Deep |
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