Language opens the world to other possibilities.
A laboratory for thinking with language.
"I always called that person Sensei." — twenty-three morae, one clause, one predicate. The craft of withholding a name, the focus slot before the verb, the triple work of -te ita, and the de aru register. Learning from the masters, part two.
Read the essay 
The most famous distinction in the Course, quoting the French original: the speaking-circuit, "1 + 1 + … = 1", and the symphony.
The same three sentences, this time from the ground up: the predicate comes last, particles are tags stuck onto words, description goes before the noun — all set against English.
Dissect the three sentences that open the novel — not with a person but with a place — and the skeleton of Japanese narration shows through: head-final order, the wa/ga alternation, the nominal predicate.
A word's meaning is fixed by its difference from its neighbours. Synchrony and diachrony, value as difference, syntagmatic and associative relations, then sound change, analogy and waves — with everyday examples.
Language is not a list of names for things. A slower walk through the line Saussure drew between langue and parole, and the idea that a sign is a concept joined to a sound.
Langue and parole, the arbitrary sign, synchrony and diachrony, value as difference — an overview of the lectures that reshaped how the twentieth century thought about language.
Reading the background of Course in General Linguistics and its opening survey of linguistic history.
How words signify
Language and thought
Communities in conversation
Who defines meaning?
Can words cause harm?
The power of definition
What language can do
Languages and meanings lost
Open research by Human / AI