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Who Was Ferdinand De Saussure?

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Who Was Ferdinand De Saussure? Chapter 2 Who was Ferdinand de Saussure? 2.1 Family History and Life1 Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure (26 November 1857–22 February 1913) was born into a patrician family belonging to the upper crust of the Republic and Canton of Geneva in Switzerland. The family history takes one back to the fifteenth-century, to the noble French family de Saulxures (‘of the willow trees’), in Lorraine, the region of Nancy in north-eastern France. As the family embraced Calvinism at the earliest possible opportunity, the Saulxures were driven from Catholic Lorraine and migrated to Calvinist Geneva in 1550, where they changed their name into de Saussure (Joseph 2012: 4–6). By the time Ferdinand saw the light of this world, the family was known for a strong tradition of scientific activity, going back to Ferdinand’s famous great- grandfather Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740–1799), a naturalist, explorer and inventor, practising geology, botany, chemistry and the like, especially with regard to the Alpine mountains near Geneva. According to Joseph (2012: 16), he set the intellectual standard for the family for generations to come. Saussure’s grandfather Alphonse Jean François de Saussure (1770–1853) did not distin- guish himself in any way, but his grandfather’s brother Nicolas-Théodore de Saussure (1767–1845) was, though perhaps less famous than his great-grandfa- ther, a notable chemist and plant-physiologist. His father, Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure (1829–1905), was an adventurous but respected mineralogist and entomologist. Ferdinand’s mother, Countess Louise de Pourtalès (1837–1906), came from an immensely rich protestant banking family belonging to Eu- ropean, partly royal, aristocracy (Joseph 2012: 47–51). Since the seventeenth century, the Saussure family has owned the enormous Château de Vufflens (see Figure 1), built around the year 1400, with its very extensive grounds, situated not far west of Lausanne close to the northern border of Lake Ge- neva, summer residence of Ferdinand de Saussure’s family, the place where Saussure’s widow retired after Ferdinand’s death and the venue of the Second International Congress of Linguists in August 1931. In the city of Geneva, Sau- ssure possessed a centrally located renaissance-style palatial mansion. 1 For Saussure’s biographical details I rely for the most part on De Mauro’s biographical notes in his edition of the Cours (Saussure 1995: 319–358) and on Joseph’s 2012 extensive, 780 pages long, biography of Saussure. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi:�0.��63/9789004378�55_003 204220 10 Chapter 2 Figure 1 The Château de Vufflens, owned by the Saussure family, who used it as a summer residence Ferdinand was the eldest of nine children, among whom two younger brothers, with both of whom he was in close contact, Léopold (1866–1925), a sinologist, astronomer and French Naval Officer, and René (1868–1943), a mathemati- cian and promoter of the international auxiliary languages Esperanto and Interlingua. Having finished his secondary school, where he excelled in classical lan- guages and already started to discern etymological relations, Ferdinand, almost 18, entered the University of Geneva in 1875. Despite pressure from his father to focus on the natural sciences, he attended courses in a large variety of subjects covering mostly arts subjects, with an emphasis on historical- comparative linguistics, the natural sciences making out but a tiny portion of his total spectrum (Joseph 2012: 168–177). During that year, Saussure decided to devote himself entirely to historical-comparative linguistics. In 1876, his father, hav- ing given in to Ferdinand’s preference, sent him to Leipzig, known worldwide as an important centre of linguistic studies. There he followed courses given by young linguists, such as August Leskien (1840–1916) and Karl Brugmann (1849–1919), who would soon stand up violently against their teachers, in par- ticular Georg Curtius (1820–1885), professor of Greek at Leipzig University, and August Schleicher (1821–1868), professor of comparative linguistics at the uni- versity of nearby Jena. In 1879, Leskien, Brugmann and others, such as Hermann Osthoff (1847–1909), who taught at Heidelberg University, or Berthold Delbrück 204220.
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