Saussure and the Beginning of Modern Linguistics
On the Philosophical Mind of the First Modern Linguist
In this post, I would like to present the life and work of one of the most cited figures in the French-speaking humanities: Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913).
He was one of the most famous linguists of the 20th century, laying the foundations for nothing less than modern linguistics and semiology. His influence in other areas of the humanities is also well known.
When I was a student at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, Saussure’s work was always a reference and was well studied by many of my professors and comrades. He was the subject of many formal and informal discussions.
I will first present his life and work from a biobliographical perspective, and then present some conceptual distinctions that made him so famous; these distinctions are quite simple.
The life and work of Ferdinand de Saussure
Saussure was born in Geneva in 1857. He showed a talent for languages at an early age, studying for instance Latin, Greek and Sanskrit.
He began his higher education at the University of Geneva and continued at the University of Leipzig, which was known as having the most advanced philological research in the world. He would go on to study in Berlin and Paris as well.
In other words, he was educated in some of the best universities of the time in continental European countries.
After receiving his Ph.D. from philosophy department of the University of Leipzig with a thesis on the use of the absolute genitive in Sanskrit, he taught first at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, where he had a remarkable influence on the development of linguistics in France.
Back in Switzerland, he became a professor at the University of Geneva. It was during this time that Saussure delivered the series of lectures that would later form the basis of his most influential work, Course in General Linguistics.
These lectures were not published by Saussure during his lifetime, but posthumously in 1916 by two of his students — Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Despite this publication process, in this text he established many fundamental concepts in linguistics that have been used and discussed ever since.
Saussure died in 1913 in Vufflens-le-Château (Switzerland) and has since become known as the founder of structural linguistics.
Research on his contributions continues even today for two reasons: (1) the importance of the Course in General Linguistics itself; (2) the numerous manuscripts of the linguist that have been progressively deposited from the 1950s to 2019, for the last deposit.