course in general linguistics by ferdinand de saussure

“Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.”

He made no further statements about the phonetic properties of these postulated coefficients. He tried to show that in many cases the late Urindogermanic sounds *a, *ā, *o and *ō originated from a *e in combination with two – as Saussure called it – “sonantic coefficients” ( coefficients sonantiques). His findings are important in Indo-European studies up to this day. In his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1879) Saussure reconstructed this Indo-European vocal system. The ‘ablaut’ is the “ancient system of vowel alternations in the parent language, visible in surviving irregular alternations among cognates like Latin ped vs. He reconstructed the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) ablaut system, earning a great reputation. Due to his research on the field, he is next to August Schleicher and Franz Bobb considered as one of the founders of Indo-European Studies. Already in 1879, the young scientist published a dissertation on the “ Primitive Vowel System in Indo-European Languages“. From 1876 to 1880 he studied Indo-European Studies in Leipzig, 1878/1879 also one semester in Berlin with Heinrich Zimmer. Saussure was the son of the scientist Henri de Saussure and of Louise Elisabeth de Pourtalès, grandson of Nicolas Théodore de Saussure and great-grandson of Horace Bénédict de Saussure.

Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Generale (1916) Ferdinand Saussure and the Indo-European Studies “Il est souvent plus aisé de découvrir une vérité que de lui assigner la place qui lui revient.” (It is often easier to discover a truth than to direct it to its proper place.) Moreover, de Saussure is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics and together with Charles Sanders Peirceone of two major fathers of semiotics. His ideas laid the foundation for many significant developments both in linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century.

On November 26, 1857, Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure was born.

Course in general linguistics by ferdinand de saussure