# Ferdinand de Saussure **Domain:** Linguistics / Semiotics **Doc Type:** Person Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Ferdinand de Saussure** (1857–1913) was a Swiss linguist whose lectures, published after his death as the *Course in General Linguistics* (1916), founded modern linguistics and [[wiki/Structuralism|structuralism]]. He described the linguistic sign as a pairing of signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept), argued that the bond between them is arbitrary, and held that in language "there are only differences without positive terms." His private notebooks show another side: years spent searching for anagrams hidden in the sounds of Latin poetry, a pursuit akin to [[wiki/Paronomasia|paronomasia]] and the [[wiki/Green Language|Green Language]]. ## Relationships - **Fields founded or shaped:** [[wiki/Semiotics|Semiotics]] · [[wiki/Structuralism|Structuralism]] · [[wiki/Linguistics|Linguistics]]. - **Debates:** [[wiki/Cratylus|Cratylus]] · [[wiki/Phonosemantics|Phonosemantics]]. - **Practice:** [[wiki/Phonetic Etymology|Phonetic Etymology]]. - **Corpus project:** [[projects/Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine|Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine]], Bryant McGill's symbolic language engine, built from 1994 into the mid-2000s, with its phonological engine, sound indexes, and lexical knowledge graph. ## Sources - Ferdinand de Saussure, *Course in General Linguistics*, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (1916). - Jean Starobinski, *Les mots sous les mots* (1971). ## See Also [[wiki/Semiotics|Semiotics]] · [[wiki/Semiotic Twins|Semiotic Twins]]