Ferdinand de Saussure Biography

Ferdinand de Saussure was born in Geneva, France, in 1857. He was the first scholar who defined the notion of ‘synchronic linguistics’ and ‘diachronic linguistics’. Saussure was trained as a linguist of the convectional, historical variety, and became outstandingly successful as such at very early age in his Mémoire sur le systéme primitive des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1878), published one week after his twenty-first birthday while he was a student in Germany.

At the end of 1906 he was persuaded to take over responsibility for a course on General linguistics and the history and comparison of the Indo-European languages, 1908-9 and 1910-11. In the first of these years Saussure limited himself exclusively to historical matters; but when he gave the course for the second time he included and introduction which dealt rather briefly with synchronic linguistics, and in the third course, finally a full semester was devoted to theoretical. An then, no long afterward, in 1913, he died, without having published any of his theoretical material. But two of his students, Charly Bally and Albert Sechehaye, decided to reconstruct a book that they published as the Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure, 1916).