ABSTRACT
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was a Swiss linguist whose posthumously published Course in General Linguistics (1916) became a catalyst for the development of structuralism. Saussure was born in Geneva, Switzerland, into a family with a lineage of noted academics going back to the eighteenth century. Saussure himself displayed a gift for languages from an early age. At the University of Geneva, he studied not only linguistics but also theology, law, and chemistry. In 1878, at twenty-one years old, he published Memoir on the Original System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages, a comparative study of vowel usage in proto-Indo-European languages.
