^1. See the opinions of Saussure, Meillet, Vendryès, and Hjelmslev in J. Marouzeau, Lexique de la terminologie linguistique (Paris: Geuthner, 1951), p. ix.

^2. The Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française (1694) said merely: "LANGAGE: Idiome, Langue que parle une nation. LANGUE: Idiome, termes et façons de parler dont se sert une nation."

^3. So does Furetière, who contrasted this characteristic to inarticulate animal cries.

^4. What the Encyclopédie criticizes Du Tremblay for is this expression, "a mass of words," which places all usages on the same level. D'Alembert, in the "Discours prélim inaire" to the Encyclopédie, employs the same idea of a "rather bizarre collection of signs of all sorts," but he does this to characterize the origin of language, that is, when there were no usages.

^5. E. Sapir (1921) speaks at first of a "means of communication," as does Jespersen, but adds: "through the intermediary of a system of symbols" (Le Langage [Paris: Payot, 1953], p. 16).

^6. Peirce, who died in 1914, had already said: "Signs are employed only in relation to each other, in a system of signs in action (‘working system’), never alone." But he was a little-known logician.

^7. See Cours (Paris: Payot, 1916), pp. 35 ff.

^8. H. S. Sorensen, in 1958, argues again with Hjelmslev to maintain the old definition of language as "a system of signs" and nothing else in his work Word-Classes in Modern English (Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gad), p. 12.

^9. This definition is given here as the most typical, though recent (1954), in Einführung in die symbolische Logik (Vienna), p. 1.

^10. Signs, Language and Behavior (New York, 1946), p. 34. On pages 34 and 36 Mor ris gives three other versions of the same definition, including: "A plurality of signs sub ject to restrictions in their combinations."

^11. G. A. Miller, Langage et communication, trans. C. Thomas (Paris: Presses Uni versitaires de France, 1956). Despite the title, references to communication systems other than language are rare, and language and communication are almost invariably used synonymously.

^12. See "Logique, langage et communication," in Hommage à Bachelard (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957), p. 33.

^13. Morris, op. cit., p. 223; see also p. 2.

^14. Ibid., p. 38. For the theoretical reasons to include the phonic character in a defini tion of language, see below, André Martinet's thesis of double articulation.

^15. Ibid., pp. 52-53, 54.

^16. Ibid.

^17. Colin Cherry, On Human Communication (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1957), p. 18. On communication among bees, he adds—to exclude it from languages—that it is neither developable, flexible, nor universal and that it is relative to the past, never to the future; the first, second, and fourth of these traits might be open to discussion. He states (p. 75) that "only man has the gift of language" without indicating a criterion. Generally, he adheres to Carnap's definition. Intuitively, however, he distinguishes linguis tic systems (the natural languages) from pure systems ("systems freely invented or con structed with signs and numbers" [p. 221]).

^18. A. Martinet, "A propos des fondements de la théorie linguistique de Louis Hjelm slev," B.S.L., 1946, No. 4, especially p. 27.

^19. A. Martinet, "La double articulation linguistique," in Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague, V (1949), 30-37. These are eight basic pages, constituting a turning point in contemporary linguistics. See also Martinet's "Arbitraire linguistique et double articulation," in Cahiers F. de Saussure, No. 15 (1957), pp. 105-16, eleven pages which complete the preceding.

^20. Linguistics distinguishes between original phonic language and its various written forms, some of which (ideographs, hieroglyphics) do not reflect the second articulation of language, while certain others (alphabetic writing, Morse code, Braille, the deaf-mute's alphabet) transcribe this second articulation. These writings are not systems of signs sui generis; they are systems called substitutive of the original phonic language. (See E. Buyssens, Les Langages et le discours [Brussels, 1943]).

^21. See Martinet's "Arbitraire linguistique et double articulation," p. 110.

^22. Benveniste's analysis ("Animal communication and human language," Diogenes No. 1 [1952], pp. 1-7), the only one which studied von Frisch's results from a truly semiological point of view, also moved in this direction, by stressing the search for a pres ence or an absence of units (morphemes, or "empty" phonemes) in the messages of bees.

^23. Philippe Gramet, "Recherches acoustiques sur les corbeaux," La Nature, February, 1959, pp. 49-55.

^24. We shall here set aside as secondary to the theme of this article the notion of "redundance," whose use in linguistics has proved to be easy as well as enlightening.

^25. On this point, the most effective texts are still those of B. Mandelbret, Word, X, No. 1 (1954), 1-27, or collected in Logique, langage et théorie de l'information (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957).

^26. Granger, op. cit., pp. 33, 37, 52-54.

^27. Cherry, op. cit., p. 122.

^28. This example should not be considered as a very special case: let the reader recall all the graphic representations of the scale, where the signifying thing is found to be linked in a rigorously formal manner to continuous values proportional to the thing signified.