Science & Tech Quote by Ferdinand De Saussure

Saussure is doing a quiet kind of revolution-selling here: he frames linguistics not as a narrow scholastic pursuit but as a field that only recently realized how big its own territory is. The hook is the humility that isn’t really humble. “Only since… more aware of its object” implies that earlier linguistics wasn’t wrong so much as myopic, mistaking word lists and etymologies for the real prize. The subtext: once you stop treating language as a museum of fossils and start treating it as a system, you gain a tool with export value.

That phrase “perceives the whole extent of it” carries the structuralist wager Saussure helped popularize: meaning isn’t sitting inside words like a substance; it’s produced by relations, contrasts, and conventions. If language is a structure, then studying it becomes a template for studying other structures - myths, fashion, law, kinship, advertising - any domain where humans build shared sense out of arbitrary signs. “Of interest to almost anyone” isn’t mere outreach; it’s a bid for intellectual centrality.

Context matters: turn-of-the-century Europe is professionalizing the human sciences, and Saussure is positioning linguistics as a foundational discipline, not an accessory. The line is also a soft rebuke to both philologists and the public: you thought language was just vocabulary and correctness; it’s the infrastructure of social reality. The intent is recruitment, yes, but also jurisdiction - a claim that understanding how signs work is a key that opens far more doors than linguistics was previously allowed to touch.