When I started working on the history of linguistics — which had been totally forgotten; nobody knew about it — I discovered all sorts of things. One of the things I came across was Wilhelm von Humboldt’s very interesting work. One part of it that has since become famous is his statement that language “makes infinite use of finite means.” It’s often thought that we have answered that question with Turing computability and generative grammar, but we haven’t. He was talking about infinite use, not the generative capacity. Yes, we can understand the generation of the expressions that we use, but we don’t understand how we use them. Why do we decide to say this and not something else? In our normal interactions, why do we convey the inner workings of our minds to others in a particular way? Nobody understands that. So, the infinite use of language remains a mystery, as it always has. Humboldt’s aphorism is constantly quoted, but the depth of the problem it formulates is not always recognized.

Saussure echoed an important critique of Humbold-tian linguistic theory by the distinguished American linguist William DwightWhitney, who evidently greatly influenced Saussure.

To use the terminology Wilhelm von Hum-boldt used in the 1830s, the speaker makes infinite use of finite means. Hisgrammar must, then, contain a finite system of rules that generates infinitelymany deep and surface structures, appropriately related. I

But, as Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of theHumboldt University of Berlin and brother to the great explorerAlexander von Humboldt, put it, the professor is not there for thestudent and the student not for the professor. Both are only there forthe truth. And truth is always a public matter.

A doctrine of signification will not emerge automatically even if we make a comprehensive comparison of as many languages as possible, and those which are most exotic. To accept, let us say, the philosophical horizon within which W. von Humboldt made language a problem, would be no less inadequate. The doctrine of signification is rooted in the ontology of Dasein. Whether it prospers or decays depends on the fate of this ontology.x