Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was born in Geneva in 1857 into a family that had produced many distinguished scholars; at fifteen he wrote an essay attempting to reduce all languages to a few roots. He studied Indo-European linguistics at Leipzig, and at twenty-one published his Memoir on the Primitive System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages, in which, by an astonishing feat of reasoning, he predicted the existence of certain ancient sounds; half a century later the prediction was confirmed by the newly deciphered Hittite language. He taught for ten years at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris and then returned to teach at the University of Geneva, publishing little in his lifetime. Between 1906 and 1911 he gave three courses on general linguistics at Geneva, and he died at fifty-five. His students compiled the Course in General Linguistics from their lecture notes, and this book, not written by his own hand, made him the father of modern linguistics.