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We must realize the extent to which it is necessary that our knowledge of language be based on history. Only history can impart to words that degree of precision which we need in order to understand them well.

— Michel Bréal

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More quotes by Michel Bréal

We define law, using the word in the philosophic sense, as the constant relation discoverable in a series of phenomena.

Historical grammar is now in a position to confirm or to refute.

Michel Bréal (1877)

Sometimes is a synonym which extends itself, and contrasts by just much the domain of its colleague. At other times it is an historical event which comes to modify and renew the vocabulary.

My intention was to give a general outline, to sketch a general division and, as it were, a provisional plan of a domain that has not been studied so far and which should be the result of work for many generations of linguists. The reader is therefore requested to consider this book a simple introduction to the science which I propose to call semantics.

There is another kind of studies which distinguished from the sometimes opposed to comparative grammar. It is known under the name of general or philosophical grammar , whose principles and observations were articulated by Port Royal and which deals with the relation of the form of language to the operations of the mind.

Michel Bréal (1886)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Michel Bréal (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.