That Saussure, for all his posthumous association with `internal' synchronic and structuralist linguistics, was not at all hostile to external linguistic studies of the rise and fall of languages is vividly apparent in a late letter to Meillet, in which he celebrates ``the picturesque side of a language ... what makes it different from all others insofar as it belongs to a particular people with a particular origin" (cited in Crowley, 1990: 242).