A Collège de France coproduction - Doriane Films
Abstract
" Linguistics, and linguistics alone, provides us with the lifeline which, guiding us through the thick darkness of ignorance, helps us to reconstruct our past in the most plausible way. Thus, in the stubborn, if partly desperate, effort to make sense of a seemingly chaotic and disjointed universe, language provides a glimmer of light that dimly illuminates a path to harmony. "
" Man exerts a conscious activity on his environment, and it is through this that he manages to reduce the selective pressures of nature. Language is an instrument of this conscious activity. Linguistics therefore has an eminent role to play in the endeavour by all the human sciences to gain an ever deeper understanding of man. What is at stake in such knowledge is quite simply our very destiny. "
Claude Hagège
