Time & Perspective Quote by Ferdinand De Saussure

Saussure opens with the swagger of a 19th-century scientific ambition - then punctures it before the reader can get too comfortable. The first clause lays out an imperial program for linguistics: trace the history of all known languages, map the whole human archive, turn speech into an orderly lineage. Then comes the quiet corrective: "Naturally" it can only be done "to a very limited extent". That adverb is doing political work. It reframes failure as a built-in condition of the project, not a flaw in method or will.

The intent here is less to promise results than to define the boundaries of a discipline trying to sound like geology or biology. Comparative philology had made real gains by Saussure's time (especially in Indo-European), and the prestige of "scientific" history was enormous. His subtext is a warning about the seductions of total knowledge: the archive is incomplete, languages die without leaving records, and the ones we can reconstruct tend to be the ones already connected to empires, literacies, and institutions.

Context matters: Saussure is often remembered for shifting attention from language history (diachrony) to the structure of language as a system at a given moment (synchrony). This line reads like a hinge. He acknowledges the era's historicist mission while conceding its narrow reach, clearing space for a different kind of rigor. The sentence stages a discipline growing up: ambition tempered by methodological honesty, and an implicit critique of which languages get to be "known" in the first place.