A Brief History of Modern Linguistics

But all these developments would have been impossible without the seminal work of the Swiss thinker Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). He was mostly unknown during his lifetime and his major work, Course in General Linguistics, was published posthumously by his students, based on a seminar he only started teaching shortly before his death. Before de Saussure, many philosophers grappled with the question of how to make sense of the vast diversity of languages. This could take two different forms: First, was there something innate in languages that no matter how they differed between each other, they all shared? Then philosophers assumed that there would be a universal grammar underlying each language and that languages represent logical thought, not things. Second, they searched for scientific laws that could explain the evolution of languages, which were rightly seen as unfixed, even though not to the radical extent put forward later. It was assumed that the role of philosophers was to uncover those hidden laws and universal patterns.