Birth of Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was born on 26 November 1857 in Geneva. A Swiss linguist, Saussure is regarded as one of the founders of modern linguistics and of structuralism. His ideas were published posthumously, based on students' notes, in the Course in General Linguistics, in which he distinguished between language as a system, langue, and individual speech, parole, and defined the linguistic sign as a union of a signifier and a signified. He argued that meaning arises from the relationships and differences between signs, and that language should be studied synchronically as well as historically. His thinking influenced anthropology, literary theory and semiotics, and thinkers such as Levi-Strauss and Barthes.

Open on the timeline