Linguistics' most quoted founder never wrote his most famous book
Ferdinand de Saussure barely published anything, yet he is one of the most cited linguists in history. His landmark Course in General Linguistics appeared in 1916, three years after his death, assembled by students from lecture notes, and scholars still struggle to say which parts are truly his.
Saussure was born in Geneva in 1857, the son of a mineralogist and insect taxonomist, and showed striking ability by 14. Judged too immature for the city's top secondary school, he was placed by his father in the Collège de Genève, a year that the boy called a year wasted as thoroughly as possible. He spent it on Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, deliberately dodging the university's poorly regarded general linguistics course.
He made his name early. Arriving at Leipzig in 1876, he published a study of the original vowel system of Indo-European languages at just 21, studied Celtic and Sanskrit in Berlin, and earned his doctorate in 1880 with a thesis on the genitive absolute in Sanskrit. He then lectured in Paris on Sanskrit, Gothic and Old High German, teaching for eleven years at the École pratique des hautes études and being made a knight of the Legion of Honour. In 1892 he took a professorship in Geneva and taught Sanskrit and Indo-European there for the rest of his life.
Only in 1907 did he start teaching general linguistics, giving the course three times until the summer of 1911. His pupils Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye turned those lectures into the Cours, and it is now clear the book owes them a great deal. His lifetime output fits into one volume of about 600 pages published in 1922, and even that has problems: his paper on Lithuanian sounds leaned heavily on Friedrich Kurschat, since Saussure could not speak the language. More than a hundred notebooks on ancient poetry went unpublished until Jean Starobinski presented material from them in the 1970s.
The influence was enormous. With Charles Sanders Peirce, he counts as a founder of semiotics, which he called semiology. His translator Roy Harris traced his impact through philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology and anthropology, and Leonard Bloomfield credited him with the theoretical basis for a science of speech. He died in 1913 in Vufflens-le-Château.
Source: Ferdinand de Saussure
