Even in scientific usage there are terms that we believe we understand and when we try to pinpoint what they refer to we notice that these terms do not have a precise meaning. This applies, in linguistics, to the term Indo-European. Mostly, when used as an adjective, it seems to apply to those languages that derive, hypothetically, from a disappeared idiom which some scholars for nearly two hundred years have been trying to reconstruct. Thus, it is said that Sanskrit, Greek (...) and Latin are Indo-European languages. When this epithet is applied to French it causes surprise. From a comparative viewpoint, French is usually seen as a Romance language and only Romance languages taken together or, better said, Latin from which they derive, seem to merit the epithet. When used as a noun, “Indo-European” may designate the disappeared language itself. But serious scholars give it a precision in this case like commun in French, proto in English or Ur- in German. Does this imply that we may designate as Indo-European the sum of the individual languages of this family, whether they still exist or have disappeared? One may indeed take a chance and do it, but not without startling or even shocking one's public. (shrink)

There inevitably comes a time when even the best informed minds are tempted to yield to the lure of binarism: when we are no longer concerned with the details of a system, but rather with our vision of the relationship between man and the world. Without going any further it can already be said that the problem of existence is presented to us in terms of a man/world duality, as though we were unable to exceed our subjective vision of things (...) so as to assess their intrinsic reality.When linguists discovered that they could isolate discrete units called phonemes, they were tempted to oppose the discontinuity of these phonemes – reflecting the underlying discontinuity of the signifiers – to a continuum of prelinguistic experience, a continuum that is not arranged as discrete elements except with reference to any significant units of the language selected for the purpose of communicating this experience to others. At the outset we have nothing but a nebulous mass where only the application of a linguistic grid allows us to discern identifiable units. Even if, in the final analysis, it will prove necessary to doubt the universal validity of this vision of things, we must recognize its usefulness in concretizing a concept of linguistic facts – a concept that has for some time played a beneficent role in research. At least for some of us, this vision should reflect the manner in which the world is gradually organized in our minds each time a perceptible reality is isolated from its context at the instant it receives a name. Allow me to introduce an illustration from personal experience. It was the last day of July in 1914. In our little village in the Savoy the international tension – which would eventually end in general mobilization – was very perceptible; our classes were idle, and teachers and pupils had settled down in a field near the school. I was six. Sitting on the grass, my attention was attracted by a plant with large flat leaves. At that moment someone said the word plantain “plantain.” The plant had not been heretofore exactly unknown to me; it didn't strike me, at that moment, as a discovery; but it acquired a distinct existence only at that instant in the green carpet of the field when a signifier had definitively isolated it. It was most assuredly the gravity of the hour that engraved this incident in my memory. (shrink)