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The survival of the past in the present was formalized, in scientific terms, in the area of linguistics in the 19th century. In the specific field of historical etymology, the state of a language at a time t is considered to be derived from a “source” language, and all linguistic phenomena are considered to “carry within them the trace of their past”ssss1 (Ducrot and Schaeffer 1995, p. 334). Ferdinand de Saussure refined this definition in relation to time in his Course of General Linguistics, introducing the term diachronie (diachrony) (de Saussure 1995a, p. 117)ssss1. Formed from the Greek dia, through, and chronos, time, this realm of linguistics describes the successive states of a language and the phenomena which cause a language to shift from one state to another. Above and beyond its methodological implications, diachrony implies a certain vision of time. In Saussure’s view, time is responsible for a dual phenomenon of “mutability and immutability”, in which signs may be altered by time while retaining certain elements: