Saussure posits consonants no language attests

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Ferdinand de Saussure's Mémoire on the primitive vowel system of the Indo-European languages argued that the reconstructed vowel alternations become regular only if one posits additional elements — coefficients sonantiques — in positions where no attested language showed anything. The proposal was made entirely on internal, systemic grounds and was, in effect, a falsifiable prediction about an unobservable language. The volume appeared in late 1878 carrying an 1879 imprint; this pack dates it 1879 and flags the discrepancy rather than resolving it, since the printing history could not be checked in this session.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.