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BIOGRAPHY
He was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1857. He
lived with his father, Henri de Saussure,
biologist and his grandfather, Horace-Benedict,
was a geologist and also the first person to
climb to the summit of Mont-Blanc in 1787,
about his mother there is not information, must
be because of cultural and social thoughts
about women in those days.
Ferdinand de Saussure was the old brother of four children. Before of him, came Horace (1859), painter, Léopold (1886), who was the first Naval Officer and then, an intelectual of culture and Chinese gastronomy, and finally, René (1868), philosophy studies, artificial and natural languages author. (Zecchetto, 2012).
Anyhow, Saussure by age 15, he had learned Greek, French, German, English, and Latin languages, he was a really smart guy within languages more than hard scients, maybe because of the environment into his home was every time a scientists and very technical speeches and perhaps that makes Saussure analyzed and thought about the Linguistic world.
In 1878, Saussure published a long and precocious paper called "Note on the Primitive System of the Indo-European Vowels". He explained in greater and clearer detail how the PIE ablaut system worked. (Ablaut is the ancient system of vowel).
More later, Ferdinand began his education at the University of Geneva studying the natural sciences. He was there a year, and then convinced his parents to allow him to go to Leipzig in 1876 to study linguistics. At the age of 21, he was awarded his doctorate in 1880. After Saussure moved to Paris, where he would lecture on ancient and modern languages for eleven years before returning to Geneva in 1891.
During this time, Saussure was married with Marie Faesch, who was a member of an old family from Gin. They had two kids: Raymond and Jacques. (Zecchetto, 2012)
Saussure is known as the "Father of Modern Linguistics" because of his work with Indo-European languages between 1881 and 1891, he studied Sanskrit, comparitive languages and linguistics. He became famous after his dead, for a publication about his “Course of General Linguistics” in 1916 by former students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye on the basis of notes taken from Saussure's lectures at the University of Geneva, highlight his influence on modern linguistics and Semiology, specially in his insistence that languages do not produce different versions of the same reality, they in effect produce different realities.
From his analysis of words, Saussure produces three notions: The signified, which is the mental concept, The signifier, which is the sequence of sounds related to the concept and The sign, which is the union of signified and signifier.
Sources
Harris, Roy. 1987. Reading Saussure. London: Duckworth.
Harris, Roy. Saussure and his interpreters. 2003. 2nd ed. Call number for 2nd
ed: P85 .S18 H37 2003
Harris, Roy, and Talbot J. Taylor. 1989. [Second ed. 1997] Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure. London: Routledge. Call number for 2nd ed: P61 .H37 1997. Koerner, Konrad. 1962.
Pedersen, Holger. 1931. [1962]. The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in
the 19th Century. Translated by John Webster Spargo. Midland Book edition.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ferdinand_de_Saussure
https://suite101.com/a/ferdinand-de-saussure-father-of-20th-century-linguistics-a329018
Zecchetto, Victorino, 2012. Seis semiólogos en busca del lector: Saussure, peirce, Barthes, Greimas,
Eco, Verón. 4 Edición, pp. 12-13.
by Suzanne Kemmer
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Found/saussurebio.html