The chief, if not the only, interest of the Cours de linguistique générale was as an account of the foundations of linguistics. Of its five numbered parts, the last three deal conventionally with sound change and changes in grammar, the distribution in space of languages and dialects, the reconstruction of prehistoric languages, and other topics natural in a manual of its day. These together form more than a third of the whole (193–317). The chapters everyone now cites are part of the introduction, most of Part 1 (‘General Principles’) and most again of Part 2 (‘Synchronic linguistics’), a third again. But the earliest reviewers, as Keith Percival has shown, did not see in these the revolution that was later proclaimed. The book was seen more as old-fashioned (Percival, 1981).

That is perhaps not so surprising. For work on the foundations of a discipline need not have immediate repercussions on the way it is practised. When the Cours appeared, most linguists worked on Indo- European or some other family, on the history or grammar of particular languages, in dialectology, and generally in fields to which it offered nothing new. Even a ‘synchronic’ linguist could learn little. The treatment of speech-sounds, for example, was based on lectures given in 1897 (editors' note, 63) which were already dated. For the rest, we might be tempted to recall a remark by Delbrück cited in an earlier section (2.3). Provided that their methods are not disturbed, practising linguists can live happily with whatever any theorist says about the philosophical principles that underlie what they are doing. Only other theorists, of whom there are at any time few, need respond.