Ferdinand de Saussure, 1857-1913 was born in Geneva into a family of well-known scientists. He studied Sanskrit and comparative linguistics in Geneva, Paris, and Leipzig, where he fell in with the circle of young scholars known as the Neogrammarians.
The study of languages as system existing at given point in time, as opposed to the historical linguistics.
Saussure lectured at the École Pratique des Hautes in Paris from 1881 to 1891, before returning to a chair at Geneva; all his publications, and almost all his teaching, throughout his career dealt with historical rather than with synchronic linguistics, and indeed with detailed analysis of theorical discourse for which he is now famous.
In 1913, he died, without having published any of this theorical material. Two of his colleagues, however, Charles Bally andAlbert Sechehave, who had been prevented by their own teaching duties from hearing Saussure's lectures on general linguistics, decided to reconstruct them from notes takes by students together with such lecture-notes as Saussure had left behind: the book they produced, the Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure 1916), was the vehicle by which Saussure's thought became known to the scholary world, and it is in virtue of his one document that Saussure is recognized as the father of twentieth-century linguistics.
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