Conclusion

Abstract

In 1878 the father of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, published his dissertation on the vowels of Indo-European languages, a piece regarded by some as the greatest work of comparative philology ever written. Yet in 1894 he wrote that “there is not a single term used in linguistics which has any meaning for me” (de Saussure, letter to Antoine Meillet). He went on to reconstruct the study of language on the foundational thesis that a language is a collection of signs, where a sign is an association of a symbol-signal-form or signifier, with an invariant meaning-significance-content or signified. This is a definition for language in a broad semiotic sense, including not only spoken natural languages, but also e.g. sign languages, animal languages, programming and logic languages, and arithmetical and mathematical codes.