Daily Inspiration Quote by Ferdinand De Saussure

Saussure is doing something sneakily combative here: demoting “grammar” from timeless guardian of language to a historically contingent phase with a pedigree - Greek invention, French preservation - and, crucially, a blind spot. The line “carried on unchanged” is the dagger. It suggests not continuity as virtue but continuity as stagnation: a tradition so confident in its authority that it never needed to ask what language actually is.

The specific intent is to clear the ground for his own project. Saussure’s structural linguistics depends on treating language not as a list of rules to be policed but as a system of relations, a social code with its own internal logic. By saying early grammar “never had any philosophical view of a language as such,” he’s accusing the old guard of mistaking a toolkit for a theory. Classical and French grammatical traditions, for all their refinement, largely treated language as an object to standardize (often via prestigious written forms) rather than a phenomenon to explain.

The subtext is cultural power. “Grammar” isn’t neutral; it’s an institution that decides which varieties count as correct, elegant, educated. Saussure’s jab at the French is especially pointed in a Europe where French prescriptivism had long served as a model of linguistic “good taste.” He implies that this prestige made grammar self-satisfied: it could regulate usage without interrogating structure, change, or the gap between living speech and official norms.

Context matters: speaking at the turn of the 20th century, Saussure is positioning linguistics as a modern science. To do that, he has to show that what came before was competent at description and discipline, but intellectually incurious about language’s deeper architecture.